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by bmurphy1976 4033 days ago
I'm very curious to hear the pros and cons of this from somebody who has intimate knowledge of Nim internals. I really really like Go's CSP model and would love to see it properly supported in another lightweight non-jvm language (yes I know about Erlang, it doesn't fit the bill for me).
2 comments
vbit 4033 days ago
Well you can already use Nim threads (http://nim-lang.org/docs/threads.html) and channels (http://nim-lang.org/docs/channels.html) - the model is similar although the implementation uses system threads rather than coroutines.

Nim also has lightweight coroutines using `async` and `await` (http://nim-lang.org/docs/asyncdispatch.html) - you can run a bunch of these within one thread.

Also, have a look at gevent for Python.

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rspeer 4033 days ago
Don't look at gevent for Python, look at a responsible async library: asyncio if you like Py3, Twisted if you like Py2 and want something that's very featureful but old-school, Trollius if you wish you could be using asyncio but you're stuck on Py2.

gevent is too much magic. It aims to give you async without changing any of your code. To accomplish this, it monkey-patches the entire Python standard library, in a way that is 99% compatible with Python, but the 1% will constantly surprise and infuriate you. Its compatibility shows no signs of increasing given how much its development has slowed down.

You can use gevent as a quick hack, but you will hate yourself if you have to maintain gevent code.

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rudolf0 4033 days ago
You make a valid point, but many years of work have gone into the monkeypatching at this point. If you use the latest version, it's very rare to find a place where it fails. It's usually only an issue if you're dealing with a third party module that makes use of native shared libraries.

I use gevent both for small and large projects, and haven't had any complaints. The monkeypatching pains my soul just a little bit, but I've found no better async framework for Python yet.

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dom96 4033 days ago
In addition to the heavyweight threads (http://nim-lang.org/docs/threads.html) there is also `spawn` (http://nim-lang.org/docs/manual.html#parallel-spawn-spawn-st..., http://nim-lang.org/docs/threadpool.html)
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digitalzombie 4033 days ago
Ada have a CSP model too, just fyi.

It's a mature language. You can look into that?

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