6 ms·

OK. Good. I’m glad someone else said this, since it means I’m not crazy. I was reading that thinking, man, this sounds like the way it’s outlined to work? Wher

OK. Good. I’m glad someone else said this, since it means I’m not crazy. I was reading that thinking, man, this sounds like the way it’s outlined to work? Where’s the new issue?

smaudet 3y ago
It's news if you are are uneducated about synchronization/threading in general (it's extremely difficult to do well so it stands to reason most people won't even understand the issues). It's also news that they are trying to provide some abstraction to help. Which is great, although as usual I suspect it will need to be applied per situation, not a one-size-fits all.
CHY872 3y ago
Nah, it's not normal or really documented. Normally when languages have async, they end up with dual primitives - the synchronous one and the asynchronous one, and everyone learns that if they do the blocking operation on the async thread, they deserve their deadlock. Generally you then end up with two variants of the API, with the standard function colouring problem where you can call lockBlocking() from a non-async context, lockAsync() from an async, and woe betide you if you get mixed up. Ideally your language can help you avoid these issues sometimes (e.g. with Rust you can't hold a non-async lock over await points). Java instead did a big thing where they made all the primitives work fine in both cases with one API, something which is honestly really hard and really reflects the level of thought put into modern Java features. But there's a long tail of stuff that's still getting cleaned up (e.g. various weird I/O apis), and honestly I think it _is_ weird that an actual language keyword made it into the long tail. It's extra fun that it's actually quite hard to hit performance problems as a result of this, as the JVM will actually detect that it's getting to this problem and boot up threads to compensate.

OK. Good. I’m glad someone else said this, since it means I’m not crazy. I was reading that thinking, man, this sounds like the way it’s outlined to work? Where’s the new issue?

smaudet 3y ago

It's news if you are are uneducated about synchronization/threading in general (it's extremely difficult to do well so it stands to reason most people won't even understand the issues). It's also news that they are trying to provide some abstraction to help. Which is great, although as usual I suspect it will need to be applied per situation, not a one-size-fits all.

CHY872 3y ago

Nah, it's not normal or really documented. Normally when languages have async, they end up with dual primitives - the synchronous one and the asynchronous one, and everyone learns that if they do the blocking operation on the async thread, they deserve their deadlock. Generally you then end up with two variants of the API, with the standard function colouring problem where you can call lockBlocking() from a non-async context, lockAsync() from an async, and woe betide you if you get mixed up. Ideally your language can help you avoid these issues sometimes (e.g. with Rust you can't hold a non-async lock over await points). Java instead did a big thing where they made all the primitives work fine in both cases with one API, something which is honestly really hard and really reflects the level of thought put into modern Java features. But there's a long tail of stuff that's still getting cleaned up (e.g. various weird I/O apis), and honestly I think it _is_ weird that an actual language keyword made it into the long tail. It's extra fun that it's actually quite hard to hit performance problems as a result of this, as the JVM will actually detect that it's getting to this problem and boot up threads to compensate.