Concurrency Models, Rust, and Servo

For some context, the 80+ message discussion that was mentioned in the first paragraph stem from this post: https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/rust-dev/2013-December/00...

Lars works for Mozilla on the Servo team, but has done work on the CML [1] and Manticore [2] languages, mainly in the realm of performance optimization I believe.

[1] http://cml.cs.uchicago.edu/

[2] http://manticore.cs.uchicago.edu/

Awesome post. All this discussion makes me realize that we haven't hit the sweet spot yet and need to keep considering more message passing use cases. I am wary though of providing too many options and very much want to have one channel type that is most useful and least error prone that we can recommend by default.

I do disagree slightly with the final conclusion that context switch on send defeats the advantage of unbounded channels since work stealing will ensure the sender runs again very soon.

It's good to read an intelligent discussion of the pros and cons of synchronous and asynchronous message passing. Asynchronous is more general, but building protocols on top of it can be a real pain (i.e. implementing ACKs and so on).

Gotta say, everything I read about Rust makes me like it more.