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by tyingq 3713 days ago
>>JavaScript, unlike a lot of other languages, never blocks

I think that's a little strong. It's more like "The group controlling Javascript has mostly tried to discourage introduction of things that block".

You can, for example, do a blocking XMLHttpRequest. It's deprecated, but possible. https://jsfiddle.net/923d5sda/
1 comments
coldtea 3713 days ago
You can do blocking everything.

A 10.000 repetitions for look while block the whole interpreter for its duration.

Any JSON parsing does the same.

Processing strings.

Doing math work.

...

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tyingq 3712 days ago
Guess I should have said "blocking I/O"? I thought it was a given that a single threaded language wouldn't magically inject some kind of concurrency around tight loops or CPU intensive tasks. Node.js people don't really think that sort of thing is "non blocking", do they?
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coldtea 3712 days ago
>Guess I should have said "blocking I/O"? I thought it was a given that a single threaded language wouldn't magically inject some kind of concurrency around tight loops or CPU intensive tasks.

Well, Erlang (and Elixir) does just that -- it's preemptive, and implicitly yields under the covers even in loops.

>Node.js people don't really think that sort of thing is "non blocking", do they?

Judging from forum threads and blog posts, a lot of them do, especially web programmers not familiar with blocking and non-blocking that only know that "Node is webscale".

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