[ot]

Let's say your program wants to list a directory and sort by mtime, or size. You need to stat all those files, which means reading a bunch of inodes. And your directory is on flash, so you'll definitely want to pipeline all those operations.

How do you do that without an async API? Thread pool and synchronous syscalls? That's not simpler.

[masklinn]

…

At no point did I say that these APIs were not useful? I’m literally the person who explained what kind of uses would be simplified by async syscalls.

And you can keep your strawman to yourself. I objected to the statement that it would make all programs faster / simpler, the argument that it would make some simpler or faster is not something I ever argued against.

[ot]

> I objected to the statement that it would make all programs faster / simpler

And I pointed out that even the simplest example you could come up with can in fact be made faster (than implementing sequentially) or simpler (than implementing with threads, which require synchronization) with an async API. So I don't see the straw man.

Pretty much anything that needs to interact with the kernel can benefit from this.

[masklinn]

> And I pointed out that even the simplest example you could come up with can in fact be made faster (than implementing sequentially) or simpler (than implementing with threads, which require synchronization) with an async API.

No, you pointed out that a different example could be made faster (and almost certainly at the cost of simplicity, the mention of which you carefully avoided).

> So I don't see the straw man.

That doesn't surprise me.