[TuringTest]

The point of async APIs is not speed boost, it's decoupling processing from the local call stack (which happens to hang up the GUI until the routine resolves, but also forces components to be tightly coupled and monolithic).

IMO every end-user-facing interface should be based on async calls, which provides better composability and forces the developer to think the relations between all full possible interactions and not just the current call. Too many GUIs do weird things when the user clicks on several controls in quick succession before allowing the previous one to finish. The program should have a model for how to resolve such anomalous inputs, instead of leaving those interactions as undefined behavior or handling it as error-prone edge cases. Having an async framework isn't enough for that, but at least forces the developer to think about out-of-order interactions between commands.

If that makes reasoning about the complex it's because current debug & introspect tools are inadequate for async-heavy flows; but that's a reason to improve the tools, not to drop the flows. Better declarative languages and inspect tools would ease development in that style.

[bheadmaster]

> The point of async APIs is not speed boost, it's decoupling processing from the local call stack

You can do the same with goroutines/green threads/virtual threads, without putting the burden of differentiation between sync and async functions on the programmer.

The only argument for async/await syntax I've ever seen is either "it allows traditionally sync languages to use async" (compatibility) or "it gives the compiler more information so it can make stuff faster" (speed boost).

[throw827474737]

And why no just "classical" OS threads? Yeah, that's rhetoric, sure you can (or did you mean that with virtual one's?) And actually once upon a time, one of rust's selling point that you could do that safely without the common data races that you have to care for in the usual multithreading/multiprocessing environments, awesome!

So to your grandposter..:

> The point of async APIs is not speed boost, it's decoupling processing from the local call stack (which happens to hang up the GUI until the routine resolves, but also forces components to be tightly coupled and monolithic).

NO, just no! Async or similar approaches were motivated by super parallel concurrency (classic example is connection handling for a webserver) to have better performance vs the overhead you'd have with os thread primitives (and even there, nowadays, that is just a motivation that is not always true anymore..)

In no way is the point of "async style" decoupling.. that we can do on a lot of levels with a lot of primitives.. especially this is very unneeded for UIs where you can decouple UI from Cpu processing from everything else with usually (depends, sure) two to three permanent threads.

On top of that, async style is horrible also for our mental models.. most clear code happens with simple control flow, classical threads (no matter if green or os) shine there because they stick to that model much more than async.

Async style was and is still mostly for performance, definitely not for decoupling and also not for the nicer programming model..

But yeah, motivations and sense nowadays sadly often gets lost over hype :(

[bheadmaster]

> And why no just "classical" OS threads?

Because of memory footprint and thread contention.

OS thread's default stack size is often in the order of megabytes. On a server with 64GB of ram, that means you can't run more than ~64000 threads at once. That's not really a high number in the context of modern highly-concurrent servers.

Meanwhile, goroutine's (and probably green thread's and virtual thread's from languages other than Go) default stack size is in the order of kilobytes, allowing you to run millions of them concurrently.

Thread contention wastes CPU cycles on kernel-level context switches and may lead to hard-to-debug issues such as thread starvation. You generally have no control over how the OS scheduler manages OS threads, so without sophisticated thread synchronization mechanisms, you're relying on blind luck.

Userspace threads are usually scheduled by the language runtime itself, which gives it a higher level of control. For example, Go runtime schedules goroutine in a round-robin fashion, guaranteeing that all goroutines will have some kind of progress in a reasonable amount of time.

EDIT: Since this post is about UI, yeah, "classical" OS threads are pretty good choice, since you usually only need a single OS thread to handle all the UI events, while the rest of the system can do the processing. So both the "stack size" and "contention" arguments are not really relevant in that scenario.

[titzer]

> On a server with 64GB of ram, that means you can't run more than ~64000 threads at once. That's not really a high number in the context of modern highly-concurrent servers.

Obviously the OS does not allocate megabytes of actual physical RAM to thread stacks, it's just address space. Just, this:

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/127602/default-stac...

[bheadmaster]

I wouldn't call it quite "obvious" (it certainly didn't cross my mind), but thanks for the information. Quite interesting.

[throw827474737]

> you can't run more than ~64000 threads

Please, we started here with a GUI framework and how someone said async is not about performance - in the end you underline my point? I said it was motivated by massively concurrent use cases that require a high number of threads... (and that similarly motivates green threads et al, full agree).

[bheadmaster]

You asked a question, I answered it.

Moreover, the last paragraph of my post actually agrees with you.

There is absolutely no need for a confrontational attitude.

[moonchrome]

>NO, just no! Async or similar approaches were motivated by super parallel concurrency (classic example is connection handling for a webserver) to have better performance vs the overhead you'd have with os thread primitives (and even there, nowadays, that is just a motivation that is not always true anymore..)

No - that's completely wrong.

Event loops existed prior to them being popularised for IO scaling - they were used in GUI for way longer.

Async is just a way to transpose continuation based programming and the callback hell involved in dealing with event loops.

Writing UI code even in multithreaded code, without async, is a PITA because UI frameworks expect UI state to be updated on the UI thread - so you need to do work on thread X then schedule a callback on UI thread and update UI state. With async you just fire off a task, await with scheduler on the UI thread and you have linear code flow.

[jen20]

> Async style was and is still mostly for performance,

Scalability, not performance.

[smnc]

For a webserver, scalability (as in ability to handle a large number of concurrent request) is a performance metric. Speed of handling each one of those requests is another performance metric.

[zackmorris]

I second this, as personally I believe that async is an anti-pattern. It's an unfortunate result of the programming world choosing easy over simple so it could recruit vast armies of inexperienced programmers for profit:

"Simple Made Easy" by Rich Hickey: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKtk3HCgTa8

I'm old school, I want the runtime to do as much work for me as possible so I don't have to. Basically that looks like the runtime providing things like process isolation and concurrency, even if the underlying hardware can't do that. Especially if we're using a high-level scripting language like Javascript anyway. Rust I could maybe see at least providing access to async functionality, but I'd vote specifically against that footgun and go with lightweight threads and message passing (how Go does it) or scatter-gather arrays (there may be a better term for this) with the compiler detecting side effects and auto-parallizing everything else like loops. The simplest way to facilitate that is to use immutable data as much as possible, passed via copy-on-write (the Unix way).

The idea of async being scattered around operating systems and kernels and such is anathema to my psyche. Code smells setting off my spidey sense everywhere I look. To the point where if the world goes that route, I just don't think we'll have determinism anymore. That makes me want to get out of programming.

Note that I feel the same dismay about stuff like the DSP approach used by video cards, where the developer has to manually manage vertex buffers, rather than having the runtime provide a random-access interface. Not being able to make system calls from shaders is also tragic IMHO. We've lost so much conceptual correctness in the name of performance that it breaks my heart. The cost of that is the loss of alternatives like genetic algorithms, which could have provided a much simple roadmap to get to the inflection point we're at with AI, 20+ years ago.

It all just makes me so tired that I feel like some guy yelling at clouds now.

[fnord123]

Are we talking about Rust or async/await syntax in the abstract?

Async/await syntax is needed if you want to have a `with` block that managed resources across co-routine boundaries.

Consider Python's `async with` which will create a resource that is freed when the co-routine leaves the execution context.

This is distinct from Java's try-with-resources which doesn't work with async code. So anytime you use `try (TelemetrySpan.start()) { blah.read().andThen(x->send(url);}` it doesn't do what anyone would ever want. Hopefully Loom fixes it.

So the async and sync distinction is needed/useful if you have both.

[bheadmaster]

> Async/await syntax is needed if you want to have a `with` block that managed resources across co-routine boundaries.

I don't see what is the connection between async/await syntax and managing resources. The `with` block is just another mechanism for managing resources - Go has the `defer` statement which runs the deferred function at the end of currently executing function block, providing the equivalent functionality without need for async/await syntax. The `with` blocks could easily be implemented in Go, but Go doesn't like duplicating functionality in the language.

> Consider Python's `async with`

Python is a traditionally synchronous language, so the async/await syntax in Python is necessary if you want to use the async runtime, while still having compatible syntax with the traditional sync runtime.

> So the async and sync distinction is needed/useful if you have both.

Every sync call can be trivially modeled as an async call that is always awaited. If you want to bolt-on async runtime onto a sync runtime, you need async/await syntax. Other than that, I don't see the value it brings to a language at all.

[fnord123]

Ok, I thought you were saying callback hell is cool. But I think you're saying async-first is the way it should be and the runtime should handle it. Which is a good idea in most cases. I think Go is pretty awesome for this approach.

[gpderetta]

That's an advantage of async vs manual CPS. Green threads/coroutines allow stack based resource handling without the syntactic complexity of async.

[naasking]

> You can do the same with goroutines/green threads/virtual threads

goroutines capture a lot more state than an async continuation/future. The same argument you made below against OS threads applies here too.

[bheadmaster]

What state does a userspace thread have to capture in order to work that a coroutine doesn't?

[naasking]

A userspace thread captures full a stack context, a delimited continuation used in async programming captures only the referenced variables needed for the remaining computation. This is a strict subset of the userspace thread state.

For instance:

   fn f() { var v1 = ..., var v2 = ...; g(v2); }
   fn g(v2) { await; /* do something with v2 */ }  // await is a context switch

A userspace thread captures v1 and v2, an async computation typically only captures v2. Compound this by all variables on the stack up to the await point, and the difference can be substantial.

[gpderetta]

I don't understand your example. What is resumed after the await in f?

Generally stackfull continuations can capture more than stackless, but do not have to. If the context switch in f resumes into g, then only v2 needs to be captured.

If it resumes in an (indirect) caller of f then v1 will have to be captured if still live, but then again, this is not expressible at all with stackless coroutines, without explicitly or implicitly suspending all immediate callers (which would end up capturing v1 anyway).

That is, a stackful continuation equivalent to a stackless one only need to capture the same amount of state.

Also I don't think that defining as delimited the async continuations as opposed to the stackful ones is correct. You can have stackful delimited continuations.

[naasking]

> That is, a stackful continuation equivalent to a stackless one only need to capture the same amount of state.

Of course if they're equivalent, then they're equivalent. That's simply not the case with goroutines vs. async functions in existing system where the program is written in a sort of continuation-passing style and so the captured state is more explicit.

Of course you could also perform some sophisticated transform a goroutine program into this form as well and, with a suitable static analysis, also shrink the captured state in this fashion. However, the fact is that no existing system works like this, and so what I wrote previously is an accurate description of the tradeoffs at this time.

[bheadmaster]

What is the fundamental difference between coroutines and userspace threads that makes such optimizations possible for coroutines and impossible for userspace threads?

[quietbritishjim]

> The point of async APIs is not speed boost, ...

I think the parent comment meant using Rust rather than a garbage collected language like C# or even Java for a GUI. Not just using async within Rust.

[Huh1337]

Java GUIs are horribly slow. Maybe it's not inherent but I've never encountered one that wasn't. C# ones are sometimes alright but only if they're using the native Windows frameworks.

[dboreham]

Like IntelliJ?

[Huh1337]

Yes, exactly