Comment by audunw

It’s hard to judge before stackless coroutines are reintroduced. But I think you’re entirely wrong that the next version of it will have colored functions, even according to your definition.

It has been mentioned that it’s possible that the default for debug builds is that every single function is compiled as an async function. I.e. there is canonically only one function color. Changing function color could become an optimisation for release builds. This is really not much different from inlining functions or other tricks the compiler can do with the calling convention if it has perfect knowledge of all callers.

> it appears to me that the Zig team decided to have every concurrency technique in the hope that it would appear innovative.

That’s a really bad take. It’s not much different from what they did to make allocators explicit. It’s an excellent approach for what Zig is supposed to be. Different concurrency models have different performance tradeoffs, just like with allocators. If the can support different IO models without making the language complicated, that’s a huge win, and they seem to be achieving that.

I find this approach the opposite of “appear innovative”. They’ve moved away from designing in a bunch of fancy syntax that locks users into one particular concurrency model, and gone for a more explicit and boring design which puts power in the hands of the user. It may not be right for everyone, but for what Zig is setting out to do it’s perfect. A disciplined decision in my opinion.

Getting stackless coroutines right for a low level language like Zig would be somewhat innovative. But not in a way that’s flashy or super interesting.