this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2024
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A great point in favour of maps is that each iteration is independent, so could theoretically be executed in parallel. This heavily depends on the language implementation, though.
Technically this is also possible with for loops, like with OpenMP
Imperative for loops have no guarantee at all that iterations could be executed in parallel.
You can do some (usually expensive, and never complete) analysis to find some cases, but smart compilers tend to work the best the dumbest you need them to be. Having a loop that you can just blindly parallelize will some times lead to it being parallel in practice, while having a loop where a PhD knows how to decide if you can parallelize will lead to sequential programs in practice.
While you do have a fair point, I was referring to the case where one is basically implementing a map operation as a for loop.