Re:"Ruby developers need to stop using EventMachine. It's th...
by cmccabe on Thursday October 25, 2012 @04:00AM
(#4696735)
I don't see the "evented runtime vs. evented API" issue as boring. This kind of thing is the core of any application you are going to build; it's hardly a minor or nitpicky issue.
Using non-blocking APIs requires you to turn your application "inside out", putting state that would normally have been on the stack into a state machine. You wind up in a maze of callbacks and low-level details.
This kind of thing might be appropriate for writing high performance code in C, but it's a mystery to me why anyone would want to do it in a higher-level language.
Re:"Ruby developers need to stop using EventMachine. It's th...
by lmm on Thursday October 25, 2012 @05:20AM
(#4696890)
It forces you to keep your methods short with reasonably appropriate boundaries between them. Good programmers should be doing this anyway, but an event/callback API at least prevents you from writing a 300-line "do everything" method.
I don't want to turn this into "events work for every program", because like I said above: I don't think event interfaces work for all kinds of programs. I've found them poorly suited to full-featured web frameworks, for instance.
I did not predict this incredibly boring "evented runtime vs. evented API" controversy, but will dispense with it by saying that it is incredibly boring, so you win it in advance. :|