"creating the first ever first-class language with green-threading at its core."
... isn't that what Go is? I think out of all languages I use extensively, Go is the only one that doesn't suffer from the sync/async function coloring nightmare.
I'm with you that function "coloring" (monads in the type system) can be unergonomic and painful.
> ... isn't that what Go is? I think out of all languages I use extensively, Go is the only one that doesn't suffer from the […] coloring nightmare.
Because it doesn't have Future/Promise/async as a built-in abstraction?
If my function returns data via a channel, that's still incompatible with an alternate version of the function that returns data normally. The channel version doesn't block the caller, but the caller has to wait for results explicitly; meanwhile, the regular version would block the caller, but once it's done, consuming the result is trivial.
Much of the simplicity of Go comes at the expense of doing everything (awaiting results, handling errors, …) manually, every damn time, because there's no language facility for it and the type system isn't powerful enough to make your own monadic abstractions. I know proponents of Go tend to argue this is a good thing, and it has merits. But making colorful functions wear a black-and-white trenchcoat in public doesn't solve the underlying problem.
(goroutines are nice, though.)
But in Go, it's very easy to do this; you can just do "result := <- ch" to obtain the value from a channel in synchronous code. (This blocks the thread, but in Go's concurrency model this isn't a problem, unlike in JavaScript.) Similarly it's very easy to take a synchronous function and do "go func() { ch <- myFunction() }()" to make it return its result in a channel.
With Python, I’m sure some people expect the same thing to happen. I think Python is far more persistent, though. So much unmaintained code in the ecosystem that will never be updated to asyncio. We’ll see, I suppose, but it will be a painful transition.
What you call "synchronous code" is really asynchronous. To actually have something that resembles synchronous code in Go you have to use LockOSThread, but this has the same downsides as the usual escape hatches in other languages. This is also one of the reasons cgo has such a high overhead.
Of course, as you said, stackful coroutines come with runtime overhead. But that's the tradeoff, and I'm sure they are substantially more efficient (modulo FFI calls) than the equivalent async-everywhere code would be in typical JS or Python runtimes.
My "you have to do it manually" comment comes from some other peeves I have with Go. I guess the language designers were just hyper-focused on syscall concurrency and memory management (traditionally hard problems in server code), because Go does fare well on those specific fronts.
gevent's monkey-patching might be hacky, but an official implementation of stackful coroutines (similar to Lua's) need not have been.
Instead, stackless coroutines were chosen - maybe on merit, but also maybe because C#'s async/await keywords were in-vogue at the time and Python copied them.
Reminds me of ANTLR - another project whose name is the opposite of what it actually does.
libraries provide pure processing machines that pull data in through well defined input functions (and output through return), and then it's up to the callsite (or host code or however we want to call our code) to decide what kind of color to paint the whole thing eventually.
this helps testability and composability too.
(of course this is not new, there was Scala's Iteratee and there's full program interpretation ... https://zio.dev/1.0.18/overview/overview_background/ )
Though the community has clearly centered on asyncio by now. So if I were to start a new backend today, it would reluctantly be asyncio. Unfortunately...
- no async/await, instead every possible thing that could block in the standard library is monkey-patched to yield to an event loop
- this means that you can write the same exact code for synchronous and concurrent workflows, and immediately get levels of concurrency only bounded by memory limits
- you'll never accidentally use a synchronous API in an async context and block your entire event loop (well, you can, if you spin on a tight CPU-bound loop, but that's a problem in asyncio too)
- the ecosystem doesn't need to implement libraries for asyncio and blocking code, everything just works
There's a universe where the gevent patches get accepted into Python as something like a Python 4, breaking some niche compatibility but creating the first ever first-class language with green-threading at its core.
But in this universe, we're left with silly things like "every part of the Django ecosystem dealing with models must be rewritten with 'a' prefixes or be abandoned" and it's a sad place indeed.