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by throwawaymaths 334 days ago
> But I guess it's going to be 2 params from now on.

>> So, if you discover that a code path you previously thought was pure actually does need to perform IO, then you don't need to apply some nasty viral change; you just grab `my_thing.io
1 comments
camgunz 334 days ago
Python, for example, will let you call async functions inside non-async functions, you just have to set up the event loop yourself. This isn't conceptually different than the Io thing here.
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gpderetta 333 days ago
But the asyncio event loop is not reentrant, so your faux sync functions cannot be safely called from other async functions. It is an extremely leaky abstraction. This is not a theoretical possibility, I stumbled on the issue 15 minutes into my foray into asyncio (turns out that jupyter notebooks use asyncio internally).

There are ways around that (spawn a separate thread with a dedicated event loop, then block), or monkey patch asyncio, but they are all ugly.

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throwawaymaths 333 days ago
except you cant "pass the same event loop in multiple locations". its also not an easy lift. the zig std will provide a few standard implementations which would be trivial to drop in.
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camgunz 333 days ago
I thought it was the exact same; an event loop in Python is just whatever Io is in Zig, make it a param, get it from an import and a lookup (`import asyncio; loop = asyncio.get_running_loop()`). I might be misunderstanding what you're saying though.
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throwawaymaths 333 days ago
hm maybe. i guess ive only used python in situations where it injects it into amain so i could have been confused. i thought python async was a wrapper around generators, and so the mechanism cant be instantiated in multiple places. i stand corrected.
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camgunz 333 days ago
Oh no you're right it's a pain in the ass and weird. But I think it's the way because there's no good reason to have more than one event loop.

Also... maybe it started out as generator wrappers? I think I read something that said that.

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Spivak 333 days ago
> no good reason to have more than one event loop

Per thread—once you start working in multiple threads you have the choice to have one global event loop, which comes at the cost of all async code being effectively serialized as far as threads are concerned*, or one event loop per thread.

* Which can be fine if your program is mostly not async but you have that one stubborn library. Yay async virality.

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