Comment by ethin

Comment by ethin 18 hours ago

6 replies

One thing the old Zig async/await system theoretically allowed me to do, which I'm not certain how to accomplish with this new io system without manually implementing it myself, is suspend/resume. Where you could suspend the frame of a function and resume it later. I've held off on taking a stab at OS dev in Zig because I was really, really hoping I could take advantage of that neat feature: configure a device or submit a command to a queue, suspend the function that submitted the command, and resume it when an interrupt from the device is received. That was my idea, anyway. Idk if that would play out well in practice, but it was an interesting idea I wanted to try.

your_sweetpea 8 hours ago

I suspect the end goal is to have suspend/resume (or some analogue) be userspace standard library functions used to implement Io.Evented. It'll end up being a userspace implementation like you see with many of the C coroutine libraries floating around on GitHub (minicoro, llco, etc).

Edit: Looking at the working prototype of Io.Evented, this may not be true actually. Perhaps this is the domain of a 3rd-party library except with stackless coroutines?

Another thing you may want to pay attention to, however, are the current proposals for getting evented IO working on WASM -- namely, stackless coroutines as a language feature: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/23446

nine_k 18 hours ago

Can you create a thread pool consisting of one thread, and suspend / resume the thread?

  • RossBencina 14 hours ago

    Doesn't that negate the point of using coroutines? light-weight concurrency

NooneAtAll3 18 hours ago

what's the point of implementing cooperative "multithreading" (coroutines) with preemptive one (async)?

  • wchar_t 9 hours ago

    There was this beautiful little time period where async/await was basically just that: resumable functions. I abused it to implement generators.