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Async/Await is finally back in Zig

(charlesfonseca.substack.com)
39 points barddoo | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.205s | source
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ajross ◴[] No.45782414[source]
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 debugging inside out code is likewise really high, even if the top-level expression of the loop generator or whatever is clean.

And it's all for, what? A little memory for thread stacks (most of which ends up being a wash because of all the async contexts being tossed around anyway -- those are still stacks and still big!)? Some top-end performance for people chasing C10k numbers in a world that has scaled into datacenters for a decade anyway?

Not worth it. IMHO it's time to put this to bed.

[1] No one in that thread or post has a good summary, but it's "Rust futures consume wakeup events from fair locks that only emit one event, so can deadlock if they aren't currently being selected and will end up waiting for some other event before doing so."

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1. csande17 ◴[] No.45782647[source]
Your comment is downvoted as I write this, but I kind of think Zig's new design agrees with you. It uses the terms "async" and "await", but the API design looks more similar to traditional threading (like Rust's thread::spawn and join() APIs). With the fun distinction that you can choose whether your program uses actual threads, or coroutines, or just runs everything synchronously without changing any of your code.