Comment by mlugg

Comment by mlugg a day ago

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I'm not sure how you got the perception that we're going "all in" on green threads, given that the article in OP explicitly mentions that we're hoping to have an implementation based on stackless coroutines, based on this Zig language proposal: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/23446

Performance matters; we're not planning to forget that. If fibers turn out to have unacceptable performance characteristics, then they won't become a widely used implementation. Nothing discussed in this article precludes stackless coroutines from backing the "general purpose" `Io` implementation if that turns out to be the best approach.

ksec a day ago

That is lovely to hear. I think the general conscious is that not a single programming language has done Async right. So people are a little sceptical. But Andrew and the team so far seems to have the do it right mentality. So I guess people should be a little more optimistic.

Cant wait for 0.15 coming out soon.

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  • krior 21 hours ago

    I would argue that Java's async is pretty nifty, especially now that some of the rough edges have been sanded off.

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do_not_redeem a day ago

Does the BDFL want this though, or is it just one person's opinion that it might be nice? Given how he has been aggressively pruning proposals, I don't put any hope in them anymore unless I see some kind of positive signal from him directly.

e.g. I'd feel a lot more confident if he had made the coroutine language feature a hard dependency of the writergate refactor.

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  • kristoff_it a day ago

    mlugg is in the Zig core team

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    • do_not_redeem a day ago

      I'm aware, but Zig isn't a democracy where the core team votes, right? Has Andrew actually expressed that he wants the proposal? Without that we're left with scraps like this commit message where he seems ambivalent. https://github.com/ziglang/zig/commit/d6c90ceb04f8eda7c6b711...

      Andrew, I know you read these threads sometimes, give us a sign so I can go down the mountain with my stone tablets and tell the people whether we'll have coroutines

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      • mlugg a day ago

        We don't know whether or not we'll have stackless coroutines; it's possible that we hit design problems we didn't foresee. However, at this moment, the general consensus is that we are interested in pursuing stackless coroutines.

        While Andrew has the final say, as Loris points out, we always work to reach a consensus internally. The article lists this an an implementation that will probably exist, because we agree that it probably will; nobody is promising it, because we also agree that it isn't guaranteed.

        Also, bear in mind that even if stackless coroutines don't make it into Zig, you can always use a single-threaded blocking implementation of `Io`, so you need not be negatively affected by any potential downsides to fibers either way.

        This new `Io` approach has made it strictly more likely than it previously was that stackless coroutines become a part of Zig's final design.

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      • kristoff_it a day ago

        we do build internal consensus before publishing articles like this one, or doing other public communication.

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