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A queue is part of an event loop solution but I'm thinking from the perspective of Erlang, Smalltalk and Dbus and distributed objects communication. Rust async

A queue is part of an event loop solution but I'm thinking from the perspective of Erlang, Smalltalk and Dbus and distributed objects communication. Rust async semantics is pretty hard and difficult to define and understand, there is pinning, runtimes, async/await state machines and awaiting and polling and type system interactions. It's all to create a protocol that allows for concurrency and parallelism that is also safe. It seems the cache coherency protocol IS what we're looking for, which is safe happens before relationships and no data races.

u320 3y ago
Rust async semantics are complex because they need to support resumable computations on a single C-style stack. It has nothing to do with concurrency, which was already supported, but at the cost of multiple stacks (either green threads at one point or OS threads). Futures just happen to be a very prominent example of resumable computations. Generator functions is another.
gpderetta 3y ago
I'm not sure how cache coherency would help here. Cache coherency is specifically about keeping cache coherent (i.e. not stale) in shared memory systems. It is not applicable to pure message passing systems. Also cache coherency per se it has little to say about sequencing and happens-before. That's the job of the memory model built on top (again, still for shared memory). At an higher level still, the general idea of consistency is of course applicable to both shared memory concurrency and message passing concurrency. Maybe consistency models is what you are thinking about? Alternatively, maybe you want to implement shared-memory on top of message passing. In this case cache coherency is definitely applicable, but I'm not sure how amenable are common cache coherency protocols to be implemented in software (but it is certainly possible, and probably what some RDMA system do).
- samsquire 3y ago
  I'm not an expert but here's my intuition. The L1 cache is very fast and each core has its own 32 kilobytes or so cache. If we could send between L1 caches of cores then couldn't we have latency below 100 nanoseconds?
  - gpderetta 3y ago
    You can already have sub 100ns latency on core-to-core communication on some common machines. And yes, thank if the magic of bus snooping the transfer can in practice happen cache to cache, although counterintuitively it is not necessarily what you want for message queues.
toast0 3y ago
> A queue is part of an event loop solution but I'm thinking from the perspective of Erlang, Smalltalk and Dbus and distributed objects communication. Each Erlang(BEAM) process has a mailbox which collects messages for them to receive, but that's pretty much a queue. Under the hood, a mailbox is implemented in C, with locks, message content is copied and the destination process owns the copy. Cross-node distributed messaging has different specifics, message content is serialized into a socket buffer, although there's queuing or locking to send to thst socket. If you write rust with all your cross-thread communication happening via mpsc channels, you can get something that looks like a fuzzy approximation of Erlang, but at least personally, I would prefer to just run Erlang. And call into nifs, C or Rust via rustler or whatever, to manage computation intense bits.

u320 3y ago

Rust async semantics are complex because they need to support resumable computations on a single C-style stack. It has nothing to do with concurrency, which was already supported, but at the cost of multiple stacks (either green threads at one point or OS threads). Futures just happen to be a very prominent example of resumable computations. Generator functions is another.

gpderetta 3y ago

I'm not sure how cache coherency would help here. Cache coherency is specifically about keeping cache coherent (i.e. not stale) in shared memory systems. It is not applicable to pure message passing systems. Also cache coherency per se it has little to say about sequencing and happens-before. That's the job of the memory model built on top (again, still for shared memory). At an higher level still, the general idea of consistency is of course applicable to both shared memory concurrency and message passing concurrency. Maybe consistency models is what you are thinking about? Alternatively, maybe you want to implement shared-memory on top of message passing. In this case cache coherency is definitely applicable, but I'm not sure how amenable are common cache coherency protocols to be implemented in software (but it is certainly possible, and probably what some RDMA system do).

samsquire 3y ago
I'm not an expert but here's my intuition. The L1 cache is very fast and each core has its own 32 kilobytes or so cache. If we could send between L1 caches of cores then couldn't we have latency below 100 nanoseconds?
- gpderetta 3y ago
  You can already have sub 100ns latency on core-to-core communication on some common machines. And yes, thank if the magic of bus snooping the transfer can in practice happen cache to cache, although counterintuitively it is not necessarily what you want for message queues.

toast0 3y ago

> A queue is part of an event loop solution but I'm thinking from the perspective of Erlang, Smalltalk and Dbus and distributed objects communication. Each Erlang(BEAM) process has a mailbox which collects messages for them to receive, but that's pretty much a queue. Under the hood, a mailbox is implemented in C, with locks, message content is copied and the destination process owns the copy. Cross-node distributed messaging has different specifics, message content is serialized into a socket buffer, although there's queuing or locking to send to thst socket. If you write rust with all your cross-thread communication happening via mpsc channels, you can get something that looks like a fuzzy approximation of Erlang, but at least personally, I would prefer to just run Erlang. And call into nifs, C or Rust via rustler or whatever, to manage computation intense bits.