3 ms·

A different take on the merits of explicit yielding (whether by async/await or raw generators), and the perils of full coroutines, by Glyph Lefkowitz of Twisted

• pron 11y ago
  I'd say that Lefkowitz's claims are mostly relevant when your runtime has no multicore support (like Python). If your runtime is single-threaded, explicit yields might (it's mostly a matter of taste), make explicit reasoning about state-change ordering easier. But then you're using shared-state concurrency again, and unsafe shared-state to boot. If your runtime has multicore support -- like Java or .NET -- all this doesn't matter, because those concurrent changes Lefkowitz is talking about may happen any time -- not just at yield points. The solution, of course, is not to use unsafe-shared-state-concurrency! Either use threads with messages (like Erlang), or threads with transactional shared-state, like Clojure, or both (in fact even Erlang has both actors and ETS, and Clojure has agents and channels as well as atoms and refs).