[richm44]

I stopped at the point where he claimed that APIs were always synchronous, this wasn't even true in the 80s. For example XLib is a rather well used API and is asynchronous (there are many others).

[koide]

two paragraphs later he addresses that point, calling that support limited in current api designs

[richm44]

Not really, he talks about HTTP which wasn't really designed for that purpose. There are plenty of protocols that were. Does this actually have anything to add that isn't covered in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_Distributed_Comput... , if so then I'll read further.

[pjscott]

It has some very interesting stuff about CRDTs, which is definitely worth a look.

[dllthomas]

My recollection was that Xlib is an unfortunately synchronous library written for the the wonderfully asynchronous X protocol.

[bitwize]

My understanding was that the Xlib protocol's asynchrony was hardly wonderful, and made syncing with vblank and pixel-perfect frames difficult, which motivates its abandonment in favor of the synchronous, local-host-only Wayland protocol.

[dllthomas]

Certainly, the X protocol's asynchronous nature isn't without some downsides (though I think you could address the vblank sync without discarding it). However, I maintain that Xlib itself was a synchronous interface in front of an asynchronous protocol - which gives us the worst of both worlds and motivated Xcb.