21–30 of 90 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Look at the node.js APIs: readFile, readFileSync, writeFile, writeFileSync ... and on and on. If that's not a meme then I don't know what is.
And the alternative without async-await is ? blocking the event loop or the callback pyramid. Node is one place where async-await has zero counter arguments and every alternative is strictly worse.
Someone has historical insights into why async/await seems to have taken over the world? I often write Rust and I don't find it very attractive, but so many good projects seem to advertise it as a "killer feature". Diesel.rs doesn't have async, and they claim that perf improvement may not be worth it ( https://users.rust-lang.org/t/why-use-diesel-when-its-not-as... ). For a single threaded JS program, async makes a l…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C10k_problem Because when you require 1 thread per 1 connection, you have trouble getting to thousands of active connections and people want to scale way beyond that. System threads have overhead that makes them impractical for this use case. The alternatives are callbacks, which everybody hates and for a good reason. Then you have callbacks wrapped by Futures/Promises. And then you have…
No. The alternative is lightweight/green threads and actors.
The thing with await is that it can be retrofitted onto existing languages and runtimes with relatively little effort. That is, it's significantly less effort than retrofitting an actual honest-to-god proper actor system a la Erlang.
Someone has historical insights into why async/await seems to have taken over the world? I often write Rust and I don't find it very attractive, but so many good projects seem to advertise it as a "killer feature". Diesel.rs doesn't have async, and they claim that perf improvement may not be worth it ( https://users.rust-lang.org/t/why-use-diesel-when-its-not-as... ). For a single threaded JS program, async makes a l…
Someone has historical insights into why async/await seems to have taken over the world? I often write Rust and I don't find it very attractive, but so many good projects seem to advertise it as a "killer feature". Diesel.rs doesn't have async, and they claim that perf improvement may not be worth it ( https://users.rust-lang.org/t/why-use-diesel-when-its-not-as... ). For a single threaded JS program, async makes a l…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C10k_problem Because when you require 1 thread per 1 connection, you have trouble getting to thousands of active connections and people want to scale way beyond that. System threads have overhead that makes them impractical for this use case. The alternatives are callbacks, which everybody hates and for a good reason. Then you have callbacks wrapped by Futures/Promises. And then you have…
The event loop model is arguably equivalent to coroutines. Just replace yield with return and have the underlying runtime decide which functions to call next by looping through them in a list. You can even stall the event loop and increase latency if you take too long to return. It's cooperative multitasking by another name.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really wish people would get over the coloring meme. Knowing if a function will yield the thread is actually extremely relevant knowledge you want available.
Funny you mention this. Zig's colorless async was purely solving the unergonomic calling convention, at the cost of knowing if a function is async or not (compiler decides, does not give any hints and if you get it wrong then that's UB). Arguably the main problem with async is that it is unergonomic. You always have to act like there were 2 types of functions, while, in practice, these 2 types are almost always self-…
When you know what functions and blocks are synchronous, you know the thread will not be yielded. If you direct async tasks to run on a single thread, you know they will never run concurrently. These together mean you can use that pattern to get lock free critical sections. You don't need to write thread-safe data structures.
If a function can yield implicitly, how do you have the control you need to pull this off?
It's a really common pattern in GUI dev so how does Zig handle that?
Is it time now to say that async was a mistake, a-la C++ exceptions? The recent futurelock discussion[1] more or less solidified for me that this is all just a mess. Not just that one bug, but the coloring issue mentioned in the blog post (basically async "infects" project code requiring that you end up porting or duplicating almost everything -- this is especially true in Python). The general cognitive load of debug…
What is wrong about C++ exceptions?
With the benefit of hindsight, explicit handling and unwinding has proven to be safer and more reliable.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really wish people would get over the coloring meme. Knowing if a function will yield the thread is actually extremely relevant knowledge you want available.
Of course it's useful, that's why function modifiers like 'const' or 'virtual' (thinking from a C++ perspective) are widely seen as useful, but making one function virtual doesn't force you to propagate that all the way up the call tree.
Someone has historical insights into why async/await seems to have taken over the world? I often write Rust and I don't find it very attractive, but so many good projects seem to advertise it as a "killer feature". Diesel.rs doesn't have async, and they claim that perf improvement may not be worth it ( https://users.rust-lang.org/t/why-use-diesel-when-its-not-as... ). For a single threaded JS program, async makes a l…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And the alternative without async-await is ? blocking the event loop or the callback pyramid. Node is one place where async-await has zero counter arguments and every alternative is strictly worse.
They could have added threads to Node as well? Granted, it would have been a lot of difficult work.
Someone has historical insights into why async/await seems to have taken over the world? I often write Rust and I don't find it very attractive, but so many good projects seem to advertise it as a "killer feature". Diesel.rs doesn't have async, and they claim that perf improvement may not be worth it ( https://users.rust-lang.org/t/why-use-diesel-when-its-not-as... ). For a single threaded JS program, async makes a l…