[nwlieb]

Could you describe what makes the Google Fibers so nice?

I'm also really curious why they require modifications to the Linux kernel. My first guess would be stronger integration with the IO model at the syscall boundary (similar to io_uring).

Edit: is this the talk your referring to? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXuZi9aeGTw

[Blackthorn]

You know how the first time you learned about tcp sockets you made a server that spawned a new thread to handle an incoming connection (or maybe not, people learn differently nowadays).

With the fibers implementation you can just do that. It doesn't kill your performance, and you don't need to go to a painful async model just for performance reasons.

[m0zg]

Pretty much. You get to pretend inside your fibers that you're actually running threads. IIRC (it's been a while) you also get proper stack trace when something barfs, the importance of which cannot be overstated.

[dkersten]

> or maybe not, people learn differently nowadays

If by “nowadays” you mean ~2000 when I first learned socket programming (using select!)? ;-)

[m0zg]

Yes, that's the one. Unfortunately it doesn't show any of the API details that a developer would be exposed to.