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> Your functions can look completely synchronous, but yield to the event loop when they invoke a blocking API.

This require either runtime-based or operating system support. If need be, you can always rely on the OS scheduler to be your "async blocking API".

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> If need be, you can always rely on the OS scheduler to be your "async blocking API".

Well, the original red-blue function article did say "just use threads", didn't it?

IIRC the original article was talking about JavaScript and there's no threading in JS.

What about web workers, service workers, web assembly threads..?

It talked about several languages, for sake of comparison.

You need operating system support in the form of async I/O, which every OS offers. No special runtimes, no threads required.

This is becoming more and more true with io_uring, but it was absolutely not the case a few years ago. (Linux AIO was a strange beast. Direct IO was great with preallocated files, but there was no way to do fsync() - especially on file/directory metadata - in an async way. Plus there was a threadpool based glibc thing that somehow faked async I/O, righ?)

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