[tomck]

> I do fully understand people who can't get their heads around threads and prefer async

This is a bizarre remark

Async/await isn't "for when you can't get your head around threads", it's a completely orthogonal concept

Case in point: javascript has async/await, but everything is singlethreaded, there is no parallelism

Async/await is basically just coroutines/generators underneath.

Phrasing async as 'for people who can't get their heads around threads' makes it sound like you're just insecure that you never learned how async works yet, and instead of just sitting down + learning it you would rather compensate

Async is probably a more complex model than threads/fibers for expressing concurrency. It's fine to say that, it's fine to not have learned it if that works for you, but it's silly to put one above the other as if understanding threads makes async/await irrelevant

> The stdlib isn't too bad but last time I checked a lot of crates.io is filled with async functions for stuff that doesn't actually block

Can you provide an example? I haven't found that to be the case last time I used rust, but I don't use rust a great deal anymore

[dang]

> This is a bizarre remark

> makes it sound like you're just insecure

> instead of just sitting down + learning it you would rather compensate

Can you please edit out swipes like these from your HN posts? This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Your comment would be fine without those bits.

[ksec]

>Case in point: javascript has async/await, but everything is singlethreaded, there is no parallelism, Async/await is basically just coroutines/generators underneath.

May be I just wish Zig dont call it async and use a different name.

[vjerancrnjak]

It's more about how the code ends up evolving.

Async-await in JS is sometimes used to swallow exceptions. It's very often used to do 1 thing at a time when N things could be done instead. It serializes the execution a lot when it could be concurrent.

    if (await is_something_true()) {
      // here is_something_true() can be false
    }

And above, the most common mistake.

Similar side-effects happen in other languages that have async-await sugar.

It smells as bad as the Zig file interface with intermediate buffers reading/writing to OS buffers until everything is a buffer 10 steps below.

It's fun for small programs but you really have to be very strict to not have it go wrong (performance, correctness).

[tomck]

I think you replied to the wrong person.

That being said, I don't understand your `is_something_true` example.

> It's very often used to do 1 thing at a time when N things could be done instead

That's true, but I don't think e.g. fibres fare any better here. I would say that expressing that type of parallel execution is much more convenient with async/await and Promise.all() or whatever alternative, compared to e.g. raw promises or fibres.