Comment by scuff3d
13 hours ago
In my experience people complain about it because they are coming from a blocking first mindset. They're trying to shoehorn async calls into an inherently synchronous structure.
A while back I just started leaning in. I write a lot of Python at work, and anytime I have to use a library that's relies on asyncio, I just write the entire damn app as an asynchronous one. Makes function coloring a non-issue. If I'm in a situation where the two have to coexist, the async runtime gets its own thread and communication back and forth is handled at specific boundaries.
>In my experience people complain about it because they are coming from a blocking first mindset. They're trying to shoehorn async calls into an inherently synchronous structure.
There's no "inherently synchronous structure", at least not in Javascript. The nature is synchronous, asynchronous is an illusion built on top of it. Which is why you can easily block an "asynchronous" program:
on any async function will do.
JavaScript execution is synchronous on a single call stack. That's why they added Workers which is different to async.
Rust's Tokio and co are also blocking. You need threads to get something that's not an inherently synchronous with merely a facade or cooperative asychronicity.
> Makes function coloring a non-issue.
Yes, having to rewrite literally all of your code because you need to use an async function somewhere is an issue.
An even bigger issue is that now you have two (incompatible!) versions of literally every library dependency.
I'm usually writing applications, not libraries, so it's a non-issue for me.
I was talking about when writing from scratch.
> They're trying to shoehorn async calls into an inherently synchronous structure.
You can make any async system synchronous. It's much harder to mske a sync sydtem asynchronous. (Misquoting from something Erlang-related).
There are many cases when I don't care if a function call is asynchronous. I'm happy to wait for the result. Yet too many systems tell me I can't, for no good reason.