Those concurrency features are amazing! Are there any other languages like that?
1 `await` (iiuc this is fundamentally not the same as the C# feature that uses an `await` keyword) and `start`.
2 "transforming ordinary code in to concurrent code with a single method call".
If you could post brief C# fragments corresponding to these two, or at least the latter (which I find the most interesting), that would be appreciated.
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Fwiw Jonathan Worthington, arguably the lead designer of Perl 6's concurrency features (following guidance by Larry, Damian etc), spent years teaching C# parallel, async and concurrent coding before the Perl 6 features were fleshed out.
var task1 = GetSomethingFromDatabaseAsync(1);
var task2 = GetSomethingFromDatabaseAsync(2);
var task3 = GetSomethingFromDatabaseAsync(3);
Task.WaitAll(new[] { task1, task2, task3 });
var somethings = new List<int> { 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 };
Parallel.ForEach(somethings, i => { Console.Write("Number: " + i); });
Thanks. `await` in Perl 6 is blocking. I'm guessing Task.WaitAll maybe does (some of) what `await` does in Perl 6?
> 2) This is even easier and it's just talking about doing a loop over multiple threads. ... Parallel convenience methods
Are you saying ordinary synchronous C# code looks like this:
ForEach(somethings, i => { Console.Write("Number: " + i); });
Depends on what you're trying to do. `await` is just a keyword that means the CPU pauses this method until the result comes back and does some other stuff meanwhile. You can omit the keyword and method completes immediately while the other stuff gets done automatically if you dont care about the result or whether it actually finished/errored/etc.
In C#, you can use Task.WaitAll() which will block the current thread until all the async tasks are finished or use Task.WhenAll() which itself is an async task that returns when all the tasks you pass in are finished (and probably the better option in actual production code).
> Are you saying ordinary synchronous C# code looks like this:
No, normal foreach is a language keyword/construct that just looks like:
foreach(var item in someListOfItems) {
DoSomething(item);
}
This is a good overview to the async/await in C#: