To add to the list of red flags are libraries which expect me to write callbacks and which don’t give me any control over the control flow in my program. A lot

To add to the list of red flags are libraries which expect me to write callbacks and which don’t give me any control over the control flow in my program. A lot of messaging systems like QPID Proton do this. It’s like the developers couldn’t anticipate that I might want to wait on input from more than one file descriptor so they didn’t bother to build input handling separately from the core protocol that processes the input and yields state changes. I see an awful lot of crappy libraries that follow this pattern. It’s typified by a function or functions that take a file name or url and that expects you to register callbacks for everything. Typically they spawn tons of threads to interleave input. Then you have to poll with timers in a separate thread if you ever want to respond to input from eg a serial port alongside messages. It’s way more complicated than it needs to be.