[hmry]

Yep. It's not an async vs not async thing. The way some people talk about it, you'd think the async keyword was at fault. It's all about whether a function is callable in some context.

Passing in the context as an argument or making it a global variable or returning a monad doesn't do anything to uncolor the function. What's the difference between `async function f()` and `function f(eventloop, callback)`? Only syntax.

Not to mention there's lots of colors unrelated to async, that most languages don't type at all. And if you use the wrong one, your program just doesn't work correctly at runtime. Thread-safe vs thread-unsafe. Blocking vs non-blocking. May throw/panic vs won't throw/panic. May fail/return null vs infallible.

[eikenberry]

> Passing in the context as an argument or making it a global variable or returning a monad doesn't do anything to uncolor the function. What's the difference between `async function f()` and `function f(eventloop, callback)`? Only syntax.

"Only syntax" is assuming, mistakenly, that syntax doesn't matter.

Also there is a big semantic difference there.. that being in one case you have the flexibility of the passed in parameters taking different forms vs. the static 'async' statement.

It is not strictly an async thing, but a general rule that additional keywords are less powerful than parameters in all cases. Ask any Lisp developer what the difference is..

[epestr]

Ante has some points on this issue: https://antelang.org/blog/why_effects. All of this is just different syntax in other languages and solved but the abstraction provided seems to be neater.

[deepsun]

I believe a clearer example would be: `async function f(): Foo` vs `function f(): Future<Foo>`. Isn't it how it works inside anyway?

[dnautics]

> What's the difference between `async function f()` and `function f(eventloop, callback)`? Only syntax.

Negative.

what is the "async prefix" equivalent of the following?

global e: eventloop;

noasync fn parent()

  childfn(e)

end