Comment by rdw
2 days ago
Once you write enough code, you'll realize you need synchronization primitives for async code as well. In pretty much the same cases as threaded code.
You can't always choose to write straight code. What you're trying to do may require IO, and then that introduces concurrency, and the need for mutual exclusion or notification.
Examples: If there's a read-through cache, the cache needs some sort of lock inside of it. An async webserver might have a message queue.
The converse is also true. I've been writing some multithreaded code recently, and I don't want to or need to deal with mutexes, so, I use other patterns instead, like thread locals.
Now, for sure the async equivalents look and behave a lot better than the threaded ones. The Promise static methods (any, all, race, etc) are particularly useful. But, you could implement that for threads. I believe that this convenience difference is more due to modernity, of the threading model being, what 40, 50, 60 years old, and given a clean-ish slate to build a new model, modern language designers did better.
But it raises the idea: if we rethought OS-level preemptible concurrency today (don't call it threads!), could we modernize it and do better even than async?
> Once you write enough code, you'll realize you need synchronization primitives for async code as well. In pretty much the same cases as threaded code.
I've been programming for 30 years, including over a decade in JS. You need sync primitives in JS sometimes, but they're trivial to write in javascript because the code is run single threaded and there's no preemption.
> What you're trying to do may require IO
Its usually possible to factor your code in a way that separates business logic and IO. Then you can make your business logic all completely synchronous.
Interleaving IO and logic is a code smell.
> The Promise static methods (any, all, race, etc) are particularly useful. But, you could implement that for threads. I believe that this convenience difference is more due to modernity, of the threading model being, what 40, 50, 60 years old, and given a clean-ish slate to build a new model, modern language designers did better.
Then why don't see any better designs amongst modern languages?
New languages have an opportunity to add newer, better threading primitives. Yet, its almost always the same stuff: Atomics, mutexes and semaphores. Even Rust uses the same primitives, just with a borrow checker this time. Arguably message passing (erlang, go) is better. But Go still has shared mutable memory and mutexes in its sync library.
> But it raises the idea: if we rethought OS-level preemptible concurrency today (don't call it threads!), could we modernize it and do better even than async?
I'd love to see some thought put into this. Threading doesn't seem like a winner to me.
Ok, you've been programming for years. But didn't learn a lot about threads, apparently.
> Multithreaded code is often much harder to reason about than async code, because threads can interleave executions and threads can be preempted anywhere.
No, green threads / fibres or whatever you want to call them explicitly don't interleave executions. They are a form of cooperative multitasking. Async/await is another form of co-operative multitasking. One former just builds on what we already have. The latter re-invents the universe.
By the by, the blocker for Javascript green threads wasn't preemption, mostly because there isn't any. It's that Javascript has a "run to completion" model. If the DOM calls a javascript event (which is effectively how all javascript is invoked in a browser), it doesn't block, so it always runs to completion. Green threads break that model. It's not a insurmountable break - the DOM events could always still return immediately, but they could start a green thread that returns to them as soon as they block. Thinking about it, the change is possibly smaller than language changes required by async/await.
If you can reason about where an await is, you can reason about where a green thread yields. The only difference is that one of them clutters your syntax and the other doesn't.
> No, green threads / fibres or whatever you want to call them explicitly don't interleave executions.
If you use them with a multithreaded executor (eg in Go), of course they interleave executions. I suppose all your green threads / fibers could run on a single CPU core. But what's the point? How would that be an improvement over what we have now?
I suppose you could make something similar to async/await but with a yield() operation whenever a call wants to block. This would allow blocking read() and so on. But its basically async/await but without declaring functions as async. And without needing to explicitly await. Await points would be implicit and invisible. But if you do that, any function call you make could yield before returning. As a result, you could no longer easily reason about interleaving. I call foo(). Does it yield to other threads before returning? I have no idea. I could read the code of foo(), but maybe foo will change between minor versions of the library.
This would lead to an avalanche of bugs. Lots of javascript code quietly depends on the lack of interleaving for correctness. Javascript guarantees that while my (non async) function runs, no other code gets executed. Adding threads, even if its via cooperative multitasking, would break that invariant. It would break all sorts of programs which are working correctly today.
> The latter re-invents the universe. [...] Thinking about it, the change is possibly smaller than language changes required by async/await.
Did you write much javascript before async/await and before promises? Javascript at the time was already async. We just implemented async execution through callbacks. ("Callback hell"). Over time, functions tended to go down and to the right. Promises were added as 3rd party libraries. Then promises were standardised. And later, async/await was added as syntax to help you work with promises. Async / await in javascript was an incremental change to give us new syntax to do what we were already doing. JS already had an event loop and promises. Async/await just added syntax.
Threads (cooperative or preemptive) would be a massive change to JS. It would cause an endless parade of bugs, and frozen websites. To say nothing of your notion we could casually reinvent DOM events. That ship sailed a long time ago.
> The only difference is that one of them clutters your syntax and the other doesn't.
One of them is explicit about where and when a thread blocks. Whether or not something is "blocking" (async) is part of the API. Threading (incl cooperative threading) hides this information. Personally, I much prefer this information to be explicit. I need to know as a programmer whether or not execution will be interleaved.
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