Parallel Letter Frequency

Instructions

Count the frequency of letters in texts using parallel computation.

Parallelism is about doing things in parallel that can also be done sequentially. A common example is counting the frequency of letters. Employ parallelism to calculate the total frequency of each letter in a list of texts.

Concurency vs. Parallelism

Wren provides concurrency via a construct called fibers. From the Wren manual:

Fibers are a bit like threads except they are cooperatively scheduled. That means Wren doesn’t pause one fiber and switch to another until you tell it to.

Wren's execution is single-threaded so we don't actually get parallelism.

Here's a quick definition for each that illustrates the diferences between the two:

• Concurrency is when two or more tasks can start, run and complete in overlapping time periods, being executed by the same processing unit.
• Parallelism is when two or more tasks can start and run at the same time, being executed independently of eachother by separate processing units.

Read more about concurrency in Wren.