← Back to context

Comment by Twey

2 hours ago

Message-passing is popular in HPC (e.g. MPI) because it more closely models how hardware works. But at a higher level people mostly prefer to build abstractions on top of it like async/await because message-passing requires you to manually compile your flows into per-process state machines, and that's not how most people think about flows (even though business people do sometimes: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-540-72863-4_...).

I'm no stranger to this but there is nuance. Thoughts on my other comment below?

  • The programming model and the implementation are not 1:1. This thread is mostly about the model; we can talk about implementation below :)