4 ms·

Yes, 100%. I've mostly only dealt with IO-bound computations, but the contention issues arise there as well. What's the point of having a million coroutines wh

Yes, 100%. I've mostly only dealt with IO-bound computations, but the contention issues arise there as well. What's the point of having a million coroutines when the IO throughput is bounded again? How will coroutines save me when I immediately exhaust my size 10 DB connection pool? It won't, it just makes debugging and working around the issues harder and difficult to reason about.

AstralStorm 3y ago
The debugging issue is bigger than what it seems. Use of async/await model in particular ends up with random hanged micro tasks in some random place in code that are very hard to trace back to the cause because they're dispersed potentially anywhere. Concurrency is also rather undefined, as are priorities most of the time. This can be partly fixed by labelling, which adds more complexity, but at least is explicit. Then the programmer needs to know what to label... Which they won't do, and Rust has no training wheels to help with concurrency. Threads, well you have well defined ingress and egress. Priorities are handled by the OS and to some degree fairness is usually ensured.
ninkendo 3y ago
> What's the point of having a million coroutines when the IO throughput is bounded again? Because if you did the same thing with a million threads, you’d have all those same problems and more, because (a) threads take up more RAM, (b) threads are more expensive to spawn and tear down, and (c) threads have more registers to save/restore when context switching than coroutines. The real answer is that you shouldn’t have a million coroutines, and you shouldn’t have a million threads. Doing such a thing is only useful if you have other useful work you can do while you wait on I/O. This is true for web servers (which want to serve other requests, so… maybe one coroutine per active request) and UI’s (which should have a dedicated thread for the UI event loop), but for other applications there’s shockingly little need to actually do async programming in the first place. Parallelism is a well-understood problem and can be used in key places (ie. doing a lot of math that you can easily split into multiple cores), but concurrency is IMO a net negative for most applications that don’t look like a web server.

AstralStorm 3y ago

The debugging issue is bigger than what it seems. Use of async/await model in particular ends up with random hanged micro tasks in some random place in code that are very hard to trace back to the cause because they're dispersed potentially anywhere. Concurrency is also rather undefined, as are priorities most of the time. This can be partly fixed by labelling, which adds more complexity, but at least is explicit. Then the programmer needs to know what to label... Which they won't do, and Rust has no training wheels to help with concurrency. Threads, well you have well defined ingress and egress. Priorities are handled by the OS and to some degree fairness is usually ensured.

ninkendo 3y ago

> What's the point of having a million coroutines when the IO throughput is bounded again? Because if you did the same thing with a million threads, you’d have all those same problems and more, because (a) threads take up more RAM, (b) threads are more expensive to spawn and tear down, and (c) threads have more registers to save/restore when context switching than coroutines. The real answer is that you shouldn’t have a million coroutines, and you shouldn’t have a million threads. Doing such a thing is only useful if you have other useful work you can do while you wait on I/O. This is true for web servers (which want to serve other requests, so… maybe one coroutine per active request) and UI’s (which should have a dedicated thread for the UI event loop), but for other applications there’s shockingly little need to actually do async programming in the first place. Parallelism is a well-understood problem and can be used in key places (ie. doing a lot of math that you can easily split into multiple cores), but concurrency is IMO a net negative for most applications that don’t look like a web server.