I like async and await.
I understand that some devs don’t want to learn async programming. It’s unintuitive and hard to learn.
On the other hand I feel like saying “go bloody learn async, it’s awesome and massively rewarding”.
I understand that some devs don’t want to learn async programming. It’s unintuitive and hard to learn.
On the other hand I feel like saying “go bloody learn async, it’s awesome and massively rewarding”.
Funny, because it was supposed to be more intuitive than handling concurrency manually.
I find it interesting how in software, I repeatedly hear people saying "I should not have to learn, it should all be intuitive". In every other field, it is a given that experts are experts because they learned first.
Other fields don't have the same ability to produce unlimited incidental complexity, and therefore not the same need to rein it in. But I don't think there's any field which (as a whole) doesn't value simplicity.
Now if you take the chainsaw without spending a second thinking about learning to use it, and start using it like a manual saw... no doubt you will find it worse, but that's the wrong way to approach a chainsaw.
And I am not saying that async is "strictly better" than all the alternatives (in many situations the chainsaw is inferior to alternatives). I am saying that it is a tool. In some situations, I find it easier to express what I want with async. In others, I find alternatives better. At the end of the day, I am the professional choosing which tool I use for the job.
I never thought "programming languages are a failure, because they are not intuitive to people who don't know how to program".
My point being that I don't judge a tool by how intuitive it is to use when I don't know how to use it. I judge a tool by how useful it is when I know how to use it.
Obviously factoring in the time it took to learn it (if it takes 10 years to master a hammer, probably it's not a good hammer), but if you're fine with programming, state machines and message passing, I doubt that it will take you weeks to understand how async works. Took me less than a few hours to start using them productively.
But concurrency is hard and there's so much you syntax can do about it.
If you come from callbacks it is (almost) purely an upgrade, from threads is it more mixed.
At least in JS. I don’t find async in rust anywhere near as nice to use. But that’s a separate conversation.
After you’ve learned the paradigm and bedded it down with practice.
If you don't need the performance and scalability then it is not unreasonable to argue that async isn't worth the engineering effort.
It forces programmers to learn completely different ways of doing things, makes the code harder to understand and reason about, purely in order to get better performance.
Which is exactly the wrong thing for language designers to do. Their goal should be to find better ways to get those performance gains.
And the designers of Go and Java did just that.
Technically, promises/futures already did that in all of the mentioned languages. Async/await helped make it more user friendly, but the complexity was already there long before async/await arrived
If I want sequential execution, I just call functions like in the synchronous case and append .await. If I want parallel and/or concurrent execution, I spawn futures instead of threads and .await them. If I want to use locks across await points, I use async locks, anything else?