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by hazz99 1554 days ago
Aren’t queues simply a requirement to do asynchronous processing? And MQs are a way to do it while keeping your application stateless, and with features to make it easier to recover from failure (e.g. persistence, DLQs).

I love discovering simpler solutions to problems! Could you explain this a bit more - how could you design things that seemingly need a queue, without a queue?
1 comments
dcow 1554 days ago
Abstractly, everything has a queue size of 1. Synchronous vs asynchronous just refers to what the producer does while its message is being processed. In synchronous programming, the producer blocks and waits until their message is processed to proceed. In async programming, the producer does other things and optionally receives a notification from the consumer once the task is complete.
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hazz99 1553 days ago
How does this apply to not needing queues? I suppose you can rely on your language runtime to juggle the various jobs and concurrent threads (analogous to workers), but then you lose a lot of the benefits of having an explicit MQ system. If your system goes down, for example, you’ll lose all the in-progress work.

Actually, is that the point I was missing? That the benefits of an explicit MQ system are not always required, so it can be simpler to just rely on the async primitives of your language?

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