Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by masklinn 1066 days ago
In fact python had general coroutines first in yield, which is mostly used for iteration (“generators”) and state machines.

Some frameworks (e.g. twisted) did use them for concurrency, and the core team originally planned something similar, however the ergonomics were not what they wanted (especially when mixing coroutines-for-concurrency and coroutines-for-iteration), so they went for a more specialised design.
1 comments
ackfoobar 1066 days ago
> did use them for concurrency

> went for a more specialised design

My impression is that JS evolved similarly - (ab)using generator for concurrency, then specialized async-await as a language feature.

link
masklinn 1066 days ago
Kinda? But that was a very short cycle, both promises and generators were added to the language in ES6 (though the community had been coalescing around promises — “thenables” — for a while), the first draft for async functions was actually created during the development cycle of ES6, and it was shipped in ES7.
link