Re:What the Hell Is a Deno?
by jdlshore on Thursday June 04, 2020 @01:53PM
(#23419635)
I skimmed the Loom article and I don't see how it obsoletes async/await. It seems primarily focused on performance.
But that's not the problem that async/await solves for me. I like JS concurrency because shared-memory concurrency is very hard to program correctly. By using a single-threaded event loop with async/await, I know exactly when it's possible for the contents of memory to change out from under me: only when I `await`. This makes it much easier for me to reason about the correctness of my application.
Given that Node.js makes it easy to spin up processes on multiple cores (e.g., with a library like worker-farm), I get full CPU utilization without the safety and liveness problems that shared-memory threads have. This is very nice.
But that's not the problem that async/await solves for me. I like JS concurrency because shared-memory concurrency is very hard to program correctly. By using a single-threaded event loop with async/await, I know exactly when it's possible for the contents of memory to change out from under me: only when I `await`. This makes it much easier for me to reason about the correctness of my application.
Given that Node.js makes it easy to spin up processes on multiple cores (e.g., with a library like worker-farm), I get full CPU utilization without the safety and liveness problems that shared-memory threads have. This is very nice.