[spease]

> But a fundamentally cooperative kernel would really worry me. You'd be looking at freezing the whole kernel, and likely the whole machine, if anything, anywhere, goes wrong with the cooperation. It won't take a lot of scale before that's a problem.

This is already the case, isn’t it? If you do a ‘while(!operation_complete) {}’ anywhere in the kernel and it never happens then I’d expect it’s pretty much done.

Whereas with async/await it’d be more likely that the coroutine would simply never resume. It might wind up being a memory leak, yeah, but not freeze your system.

[afiori]

The parallel case with async functions should be a long running computation that does not contain any yield point, so that it cannot be suspended easily. I remember that it is possible to construct (contrived) examples of this also in Erlang.