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rafaelmnyesterday at 6:30 PM3 repliesview on HN

async/await came out of C# (well at least the JS version of it).

There are a bunch of use cases for it outside of implementing concurrency in a single threaded runtime.

Pretty much every GUI toolkit I've ever used was single threaded event loop/GUI updates.

Green threads are a very controversial design choice that even JVM backed out of.


Replies

ziml77yesterday at 8:05 PM

Yep and I loved when C# introduced it. I worked on a system in C# that predated async/await and had to use callbacks to make the asynchronous code work. It was a mess of overnested code and poor exception handling, since once the code did asynchronous work the call stack became disconnected from where the try-catches could take care of them. async/await allowed me to easily make the code read and function like equivalent synchronous code.

ngruhnyesterday at 7:08 PM

> async/await came out of C# (well at least the JS version of it).

Not sure if inspired by it, but async/await is just like Haskells do-notation, except specialized for one type: Promise/Future. A bit of a shame. Do-notation works for so many more types.

- for lists, it behaves like list-comprehensions.

- for Maybes it behaves like optional chaining.

- and much more...

All other languages pile on extra syntax sugar for that. It's really beautiful that such seemingly unrelated concepts have a common core.

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Ygg2yesterday at 6:49 PM

> Green threads are a very controversial design choice that even JVM backed out of.

Did they? Project Loom has stabilized around Java 21, no?

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