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Async/Await is finally back in Zig

(charlesfonseca.substack.com)
39 points barddoo | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | 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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jayd16 ◴[] No.45782502[source]
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.

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valcron1000 ◴[] No.45782877[source]
> Knowing if a function will yield the thread is actually extremely relevant knowledge you want available.

When is this relevant beyond pleasing the compiler/runtime? I work in C# and JS and I could not care less. Give me proper green threads and don't bother with async.

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1. jayd16 ◴[] No.45782942[source]
Knowing when execution will yield is useful when you want to hold onto a thread. If you run your GUI related async tasks on the GUI thread you don't have to worry about locks or multi threaded data structures. Only a single GUI operation will happen at a time.

If yields are implicit, you don't have enough control to really pull that off.

Maybe it's possible but I haven't seen a popular green threaded UI framework that let's you run tasks in background threads implicitly. If I need to call a bunch of code to explicitly parcel background work, that just ends up being async/await with less sugar.