[Rust] Extract Concepts from v2 exercise parallel-letter-frequency

languages/rust/reference/exercise-concepts/parallel-letter-frequency.md

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+# Concepts of Parallel letter frequency
+
+This exercise boasts a wide variety of possible solutions in combination with the help of external crates. For keeping the amount of work manageable this document contains a small selection of possibilities. Crossbeam solutions have a similar set of concepts as listed here, and Rayon requires only a subset.
+
+## Summary
+- **Primitives**
+  - `usize`
+  - `char`
+  - floating point values
+    - Dividing floating points vs dividing integers
+- **Immutability/explicit mutability**
+- **Strings**
+  - `&str` type
+- **Unicode**
+  - Unicode methods vs ascii methods
+- **Slices**
+- **Tuples**
+- **Destructuring**
+- **Functions**
+  - Higher order functions
+  - Closures
+- **Visibility**
+- **Data collections**
+  - `HashMap`
+- **`Option` type**
+- **Iterators**
+  - Lazy evaluation
+  - Consuming/non-consuming
+  - As per the second example: `FromIterator` trait
+- **For loop**
+- **References**
+  - Reference counters (`Arc` in this situation)
+  - Dereferencing
+- **Lifetimes**
+  - `'Static`
+  - `move`
+  - Dropping
+- **Crates**
+- **Parallelism**
+  - Spawning and joining
+#### Concepts related to parallelism
+- **Channels**
+- **`Mutex` and `RwLock`***
+- **Futures**
+- **Reference counting**
+
+*<sub>*Related but here not applicable for reasonable solutions</sub>*
+
+## General
+- Strings: specifically the `str` is always a factor here
+- Unicode: performance/feature concessions of ascii vs unicode methods. Benchmarking is skewed when benchmark uses unicode methods and the solution uses ascii methods.
+- Iterators: iterating over input or chunks of it.
+- Collections: Iterating over a `HashMap` and using `Entry`. Commonly handles are collected into `Vec`.
+- References
+- Numbers: `Add` trait specifically
+- For loop: can't join threads in an Iterator because of move.
+- **Opt** Visibility: keep implementation details non-public
+- **Opt** slices: `.chunks()` is a often used method for splitting up input for worker threads. Alternatively subslices are used.
+- **Opt** Higher-order functions: the HashMaps can be merged by a higher-order function with an Iterator.
+- **Opt** Types: for dividing input we can cast integers to floating point values for applying rounding
+- **Opt** Crates
+
+## Std approach with or without channels
+- Parallelism - subtopic spawning/joining threads.
+- Iterators - subtopic lazily-evaluated: spawning and joining threads with the same Iterator prevents parallelism.
+- Lifetimes - subtopics `'static lifetime` and explicit `move` semantics
+- Iterators/lifetimes - subtopic consuming Iterators: threads can't be joined using Iterator.
+- Option type: unwrapping thread or channel results
+- Functions: Specifically higher order functions are required for thread spawning. Closures are an option here.
+
+## Std approach with channels
+- Parallelism - subtopic channels.
+- Tuples: `mpsc::channel()` returns a Tuple
+- Destructuring: tuple can be destructured on assignment
+- Lifetimes: `drop()`
+
+## Alternate approach with shared variables
+- Reference counting: Sharing aggregate data between threads with a reference counted collection.
+- **Honorable mention**: Parallelism - subtopic Mutexes. Not necessary/useful for this exercise, but a common concept nonetheless. Related: `RwLock`.
+
+### Example std with channels
+```rust
+use std::collections::HashMap;
+use std::thread;
+use std::sync::mpsc;
+
+pub fn frequency(input: &[&str], worker_count: usize) -> HashMap<char, usize> {
+    let (tx, rx) = mpsc::channel();
+
+    let _handles = input.chunks((input.len() as f64 / worker_count as f64).ceil() as usize)
+        .map(|slice| slice.concat())
+        .map(|slice| {
+            let tx = tx.clone();
+            thread::spawn(move || {
+                let mut map: HashMap<char, usize> = HashMap::new();
+                for chr in slice.chars().filter(|c| c.is_alphabetic()) {
+                    if let Some(c) = chr.to_lowercase().next() {
+                        (*map.entry(c).or_insert(0)) += 1;
+                    };
+                }
+                tx.send(map).unwrap()
+            })
+        }).collect::<Vec<_>>();
+
+    drop(tx);
+
+    let mut result: HashMap<char, usize> = HashMap::new();
+    for received in rx {
+        for (c, count) in received {
+            *result.entry(c).or_insert(0) += count;
+        }
+    }
+
+    result
+}
+```
+
+### Example crate with Arc
+```rust
+use std::collections::HashMap;
+use std::iter::FromIterator;
+use std::sync::Arc;
+use dashmap::DashMap;
+
+pub fn frequency(input: &[&str], worker_count: usize) -> HashMap<char, usize> {
+    let map: Arc<DashMap<char, usize>> = Arc::new(DashMap::new());
+
+    let handles = input
+        .chunks((input.len() as f64 / worker_count as f64).ceil() as usize)
+        .map(|slice| slice.concat())
+        .map(|slice| {
+            let map = map.clone();
+            std::thread::spawn(move || {
+                for c in slice.chars().filter(|c|c.is_alphabetic())
+                  .flat_map(|c| c.to_lowercase().next()) {
+                    *map.entry(c).or_insert(0) += 1;
+                }
+            })
+        }).collect::<Vec<_>>();
+
+    for h in handles {
+        h.join().unwrap();
+    }
+
+    map.iter().map(|x| (*x.key(), *x.value())).collect()
+}
+```