Comment by kibwen

Comment by kibwen 2 days ago

> But the stackfull model is

The existence of advantages doesn't change anything here. The problems is that the disadvantages made this approach a non-starter, despite a lot of effort to make it work. Tradeoffs exist in language design, and the approaches were judged accordingly. What works for Go doesn't necessarily work for Rust, because they target different domains.

> I am really confident that if the async system was designed today we would've had a totally different model

No, without solving the original problems, the outcome would be the same. The Rust devs at the time were well aware of io_uring.

no_wizard 2 days ago

What were the original problems exactly? From what I recall they effectively boiled down to size concerns due to seeing themselves as a c/c++ successor and they didn’t want to lose any adoption in the embedded systems target audience.

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kibwen a day ago

Have you read the article by Aaron Turon linked above? It's very informative, and if you have any questions about specific parts of it, feel free to reference them. In particular it boils down to the fact that Rust bends over backwards to avoid putting anything that requires allocation or dynamic dispatch in the core language (e.g. Rust's closures are fascinating in that they're stack-allocated, like C++'s, while also playing nicely with the borrow checker, which is quite a feat). This property extends to the current design of async, which makes async suitable for embedded devices, which is extremely cool (check out the Embassy project for the state of the art in this space).

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const_cast a day ago

I mean from an outsiders perspective on Rust this is how I saw it.
Rust is in a strange place because they're a systems language directly competing with C++. Async, in general, doesn't vibe with that but green threads definitely don't.
If you're gonna do green threads you might as well throw in a GC too and get a whole runtime. And now you're writing Go.

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- no_wizard a day ago
  
  I don't think doing green threads equates to 'well might as well have a GC now!'. I think they made the wrong tradeoff too, because hardware will inevitably catch up to the language requirements, especially if its desirable to use. Not to mention over time things can be made more efficient from the Rust side as well, with compiler improvements, better programming techniques etc.
  I think they made the wrong bet, personally. Having worked in enough languages that have function coloring problems I would avoid it as a language design as a line in the sand item, regardless of tradeoffs
  
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  surajrmal a day ago
  
  There are other languages with green threads and folks are free to use those. Zig is trying to do interesting things with stackful coroutines.
  I don't think I nor most systems programmers would have chosen rust if it required green threads instead of stackless coroutines for async. If you work on embedded or low level environments like kernels and whatnot, you need something that falls back to callbacks for async. I'm sure folks who work on servers would have been fine with green threads but they were not the target audience for rust. Being upset because you fall outside the target demographic of a particular language doesn't mean they made the wrong choice. It just means you should look for something else.
  
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  fpoling a day ago
  
  Hardware does not catches up with language requirements. If anything, it is languages/compilers that catch up with hardware, like SSE instructions and loop parallel ism.
  For me the mistake that Rust made was that it tried too hard to behave like C/C++ with its single execution stack.
  Ada uses two stacks allowing a callee to return a stack-allocated arrays to the caller. Not only it allows to avoid dynamic allocations in many cases where C++ allocates memory, but it also reduces the need for pointers making the code safer even without the borrow checker.
  If instead of async Rust spent efforts on implementing something like that or even allow for explicit stack control from safe code so green threads or co-routines could be implemented as a library it could be more compatible with io_uring world.
  
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  zozbot234 a day ago
  
  > Ada uses two stacks allowing a callee to return a stack-allocated arrays to the caller.
  You could do this manually by threading a pointer to a separately-allocated stack (could be on the heap or perhaps just a static allocation) as an extra function parameter. It's just a very simple case of arena allocation, with similar advantages and disadvantages. (For example, the caller must ensure that enough space is available on the dynamic-data stack for anything that the callee might want to push onto it.) In general it's just not really worth it, because it turns out that dynamically-sized data that one would not want to simply place on the heap is rare anyway.
  
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- zozbot234 a day ago
  
  On the contrary, stackless async can "vibe" quite well with deep embedded workloads that also require a low-level language like C/C++. There's very few meaningful alternatives to Rust in that space.
  
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