Re:How to think about `async`/`await` in Rust
by gpderetta on Wednesday July 05, 2023 @07:45AM
(#36598973)
Async is a special case of continuations. If you have fist class continuations (and monads do notation in practice gives you that), you hardly need async as a language feature.
Re:How to think about `async`/`await` in Rust
by louthy on Wednesday July 05, 2023 @08:11AM
(#36599251)
That's exactly my point. It's not a language feature, it's a library. Haskell, F#, and any other language that supports monads (or as you say, first class continuations), have the ability to do async/await - in a way that appears first-class - but actually is just regular code.
C#, and other languages that have taken the C# approach [to async/await], don't have first class continuations (well, C# does with LINQ, but that compromises most ways the average OO dev works). They implement async/await with first-class keywords that indicate where to slice a method in two.
In my language-ext [1] project I have added the LINQ operators to `Task<T>` which allows C# tasks to be used in the same way that Async is done in F#.
[1] https://github.com/louthy/language-ext/blob/main/LanguageExt...
Re:How to think about `async`/`await` in Rust
by gpderetta on Wednesday July 05, 2023 @08:38AM
(#36599554)
Do-notation is a language feature though, and that's a superset of async/await.
Incidentally there are papers that are trying to improve on async in C++ by trying to sneak in generalized do-notation.
It’s possible to do async like behaviour in C# using LINQ, so you could argue C# has had the capability (like F#) since LINQ was released.
But, I believe C# was the first mainstream language to implement the async/await method-splitting state-machine (as a language feature)