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by 15155 3692 days ago
Why not Boost? / Why not libuv?

Why not EventMachine? / Why not Celluloid?

Why not Twisted? / Why not gevent?

This is a really sad situation unfortunately. I was hoping Rust wouldn't head down this road.

To preempt: a systems language shouldn't dictate these high-level matters, but there certainly should be one "blessed solution" vs. a sea of incompatible libraries.

Go doesn't have this problem, Node.js doesn't have this problem, Elixir doesn't have this problem. Sad deal.
2 comments
pcwalton 3692 days ago
> To preempt: a systems language shouldn't dictate these high-level matters

But you cited a whole bunch of languages that do dictate this. Those languages don't have those problems because you can't write competing implementations of low-level async I/O in those languages.

And there certainly are competing, incompatible implementations of relatively low-level functionality in Golang, for example fasthttp: https://github.com/valyala/fasthttp

I'm all for standardizing on one solution when the time comes. Rust will have an async I/O story. But right now nothing is mature enough yet to begin that process. Rushing to standardize something that is not yet ready is the worst of all possible options.

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15155 3692 days ago
> But you cited a whole bunch of languages that do dictate this

I don't believe the language needs to dictate something. It might help, sure, but there's no reason that is a requirement.

For the sake of compatibility, a blessed option should be offered.

The AIO situation today in Rust looks identical to Ruby, Python, and C++.

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pcwalton 3692 days ago
No, it doesn't. Basically all async I/O code in the Rust ecosystem uses mio.

And eventually a standard interface will be offered. Just not before it's ready.

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15155 3692 days ago
Basically all async I/O code in the Ruby ecosystem uses EventMachine.

That's not the point: more of an ecosystem is built around the stdlib's blocking I/O than mio. New projects everyday are built around things that will eventually be incompatible.

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nathansizemore 3692 days ago
> Why not X?

I wanted to use Rust and learn epoll through working with it directly.

> I was hoping Rust wouldn't head down this road.

To my knowledge, Rust does not have a std async story. I hope it will, and I believe libs like mio will help flush out platform agnostic ideas and a tested API.

> To preempt: a systems language shouldn't dictate these high-level matters

All of your cited example languages are _not_ systems language? Node.js isn't even a language? It could be listed above with the rest of your async I/O options across several languages.

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