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Often overlooked: Seamless FFI and "colorless" async programming are directly opposed. People often advocate the latter without realizing how much they benefit from the former. To name one example: OS mutexes don't know about your language runtime.

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Pepijn de Vos

@pepijndevos

Mar 12, 2021

I'd be interested to understand where Zig is in this picture. As I understand it it has colourless async, but what is it lacking in FFI? I can imagine if you do stuff related to threads but you're an eventloop weirdness happens, but how does colourful async solve that?

Patrick Walton

@pcwalton

Mar 12, 2021

If sync and async are separate you always know what mode you're in and the relationship your language threads have with OS threads, which gives you the information you need to uphold whatever invariants the FFI code you're calling requires.

Pepijn de Vos

@pepijndevos

Mar 12, 2021

I see. So it's like static typing your parallelism. Could you have colour generics to get the best of both?

Replying to

and

I think you could use something like effects and handlers to abstract over sync vs. async - this is the approach Multicore OCaml is taking for instance. Ie. the effect handler controls how stuff is scheduled. Not sure how it plays with FFI though.

12:21 AM · Aug 3, 2021Twitter for iPhone