Hacker News Reader

Is there any reason to use async when your platform supports virtual threads?

I ask as someone who uses java and is about to rewrite a bunch of code to be able to chuck the entire async paradigm into the trash can and use a blocking model but on virtual threads where blocking is ok.

View on HN

Virtual threads or green threads, etc., are all names for the same thing: stackful coroutines. I would say yes! If your language/platform/runtime supports them, that should definitely be your starting point.

> that should definitely be your starting point.

Could you expand a bit? Why?

Not OP, but synchronous code is much, much easier to understand and write than asynchronous code. What Java is doing is making synchronous code have all the advantages of asynchronous code by making blocking a Thread become a cheap operation (instead of blocking a real OS Thread), making the whole benfit of async code go away while getting rid of async's difficulties, specially in a language that doesn't have async/await (which makes async code "look" synchronous - but in Rust, as this blog post shows, that is not really the case).

Hot off the presses from the JVM Language Summit a few weeks ago; The Challenges of Introducing Virtual Threads to the Java Platform [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsCJYQDPrrE

Reply on news.ycombinator.com