Comment by ori_b
> Go: goroutines are not async
Sure they are. The abstraction they provide is a synchronous API, but it's accomplished using an async runtime.
> Go: goroutines are not async
Sure they are. The abstraction they provide is a synchronous API, but it's accomplished using an async runtime.
Eh, not really. Async (in this semantic context) is generally about cooperative concurrency and also often about concurrent or multiplexed I/O. Pthreads aren't async by those definitions, though you can run async code within a given pthread as usual.
Goroutines are an unusual case, in that they don't have cooperative concurrency--they're pre-emptive--but the Go runtime does perform I/O using concurrent multiplexers under the hood.
So goroutines are kind of both: computation execution and code semantics look like pthreads, but I/O operations look like NodeJS on the backend.
Now, I'm not sure what "async runtime" means in the GP. If they're referring to I/O multiplexers, then they should say that. If they're referring to something else, then I'm not familiar with other uses of that term that would accurately apply to Golang.
Well, that's exactly what the kernel is doing when it swaps threads. When you block on I/O, you're voluntarily pausing your thread and doing concurrent I/O with another thread.
Async and threads are a lot closer than most people think. An OS is mainly a queue for swapping between async operations, and a collection of abstracted services that the async operations can request, like network or disk i/o.
Yeah, in fact I'd argue that any abstraction that doesn't let you treat the work as sync is fundamentally broken.
https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2015/02/01/what-color-is-...
I'm trying to understand the context in which the parent commenter uses the term, since it can mean multiple things. They said "async" and then enumerated some wildly different things.
Like, do you need async runtimes to do epoll async in Rust? No. Ok, so that excludes many definitions. Do you need coroutines in C++ to do aio for reading and writing? No.
So like I said, what do they mean by "async"? The blog post refers to a web server that does "async" in Rust without any async runtime, and without the `async` keyword.
In other words, that parent commenter is what's called "not even wrong".
By that definition, pthread is also async. If everything is async, then the word loses all meanings.
Async is really about the surface syntax and ergonomics, not the implementation.