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Comment by bmitc | Hacker News Reader

Are those new? What are they by name?

.NET has had first-class parallelism and async/await since around .NET Framework 4.0 release which was...13 years ago huh. There have been many improvements in the underlying runtime since then though.

A garden variety of keywords is async/await, TPL (tasks/futures and structured concurrency) and PLINQ (Rust's Rayon).

You're right the basic support's been around a long time. However, originally you always had to use Task methods. The pleasant async/await keywords didn't arrive until C# 5.0, in 2012.

Admittedly that's also a long time ago.

In addition to the base TPL (System.Threading.Tasks), IAsyncEnumerable<T> in recent .NET versions has deepened and simplified even more useful concurrency patterns (Async Generators), especially when paired with Ix.NET (System.Interactive.Async) which adds a lot more LINQ/PLINQ operators, many of which are designed to intentionally mirror ReactiveX.NET (System.Reactive), the even older but just as useful push-based (IObservable) relative of IAsyncObservable.

I think the parent comment is talking about System.Threading.Tasks.

I might be wrong though.

Oh, I see. I was hoping for something new. I keep on hoping some sort of BEAM-like (from Erlang) process gets added to .NET.

You might be interested in Orleans: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/orleans/overview

Orleans is definitely interesting, but I have never looked into it much because it's my understanding that it is a cloud-only solution, in that it requires some Orleans or Azure service. Is that correct?

No, you can run in standard processes - there's even documentation [1] about hosting it in Kubernetes.

[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/orleans/deployment/...

Further to the other reply you can run it alongside asp.net; one process can be an Orleans node and and an asp.net server.

It was tried and the dotnet team decided to drop it: https://github.com/dotnet/runtimelab/issues/2398

investigations continue: https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/94620

I have considered the that, but I ultimately decided they work because they are a fabric of what that ecosystem _is_, not what it has.

It's the same reason two sites that are more or less the same will have entirely different communities. There isn't any reason you couldn't implement the one on the other, but it's not in the core substance.

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