Yet another programming blog. Thoughts on software and related misadventures.
  • pileghoff@programming.dev
    17·
    1 year ago

    Async rust might suck, compared to async in higher level languages, but for someone comming from C, async rust simplifies a lot of stuff. It often feels like a lot of criticisms of rust boils down to the fact that rist was sold to both people using low and high level languages. I don’t doubt that async rust is shit when all you want is a faster typescript.

    Edit: I certainly also have my criticisms of rust and its async implementation, and I think some of the authors concerns are valid, it was just an observation about the tension between the needs of the two groups of users.

  • BB_C@programming.dev
    15·
    1 year ago

    fn foo(＆big, ＆chungus)

    is out,

    async fn foo(＆BIG_GLOBAL_STATIC_REF_OR_SIMILAR_HORROR, sendable_chungus.clone())

    is in.

    Or maybe you know

    fn foo(＆big, ＆chungus)

    is out

    async fn foo(big, chungus) -> (big, chungus)

    is in

    Or

    async fn foo(big, chungus) {
  // ...
  tx.send((big, chungus)).await?;
  // ...
}

    is in

    Moving (movable/sendable) data is not limited by number or direction, you know. And that second one even makes use of them great Hoare channels! And gives us control on how long we hold on to data before sending it back (modified or not). But I digress. Let’s go back to the important talking point that Hoare was right!

    • BatmanAoD@programming.dev
      1·
      1 year ago

      I think the point of the “BIG_GLOBAL_STATIC…” name is that global statics are bad, not that the syntax is ugly. That said, you’re absolutely correct that combining channels with async code is the way to go.

      • BB_C@programming.dev
        11·
        1 year ago

        I think the point of the “BIG_GLOBAL_STATIC…” name is that global statics are bad, not that the syntax is ugly.

        Yes. And my point was that there is an obvious way of sharing data besides passing static-refs, cloning, and using Arcs, which is moving data bidirectionally. That was conveniently, or ignorantly, glossed over by the coping gopher.

  • wim@lemmy.sdf.org
    121·
    1 year ago

    Maybe it’s just me, but isn’t async programming a mess in all programming languages?

      • vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de
        6·
        1 year ago

        not really. first of all async in not the same as threading. And even then, while it makes parallel code easier to write (not easier to reason about), it still has the exact same footguns as anything else, as soon as you venture away from having only one consumer for every producer. Synchronization is still all on you

      • wim@lemmy.sdf.org
        5·
        1 year ago

        That’s a whole different thing to me. That’s not async, that’s channels and multithreading.

        I do that in Rust as well with mcsp channels and it’s been fine.

        It’s the async/await bit that I find incredibly akward all the time.

        • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
          3·
          1 year ago

          Channels and multithreading are a solution to async problems. Instead of a keyword trying to abstract away the async, you use a mechanism for communicating between coroutines. You can run Go with a single execution thread and still get benefits from goroutines and channels. In fact, Go didn’t turn on multithreading until 1.5.

          Go solves async with goroutines and channels, not with an async keyword. The runtime is pretty heavy and steps in when standard library functions would block. In other words, it’s async by default since blocking IO causes another goroutines to execute.

          • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
            3·
            1 year ago

            They’re very similar, but with very different ergonomics. Go channels are part of the language, so libraries use them frequently, whereas tokio is a separate library and not nearly as ubiquitous. So you’ll get stuff like this:

            c := make(chan bool)
go func () {
    time.Sleep(time.Second*2)
    c <- true
} ()

select {
case val := <-c:
case _ := <-time.After(time.Second)
}

            This lets you implement a simple timeout for a channel read. So the barrier to using them is really low, so they get used a ton.

            I haven’t looked at the implementation of tokio channels, so I don’t know if there’s something subtly different, but they do have the same high level functionality.

  • acow@programming.dev
    7·
    1 year ago

    It really is interesting how async Rust takes the shine off of Rust to such an extent. If good old stack based, single threaded Rust wasn’t so polished, I don’t think the async parts would stand out so much. Something that might help is to have some sort of benchmark showing that Arcing through an async problem is still faster than typical GCed languages.