[swift-evolution] [Concurrency] Fixing race conditions in async/await example

[Howard Lovatt]

My argument goes like this:

  1. You don't need async/await to write a powerful future type; you can
use the underlying threads just as well, i.e. future with async/await is no
better than future without.

  2. Since future is more powerful, thread control, cancel, and timeout,
people should be encouraged to use this; instead because async/await are
language features they will be presumed, incorrectly, to be the best way,
consequently people will get into trouble with deadlocks because they don't
have control.

  3. async/await will require some engineering work and will at best make a
mild syntax improvement and at worst lead to deadlocks, therefore they just
don't carry their weight in terms of useful additions to Swift.

Therefore, save some engineering effort and just provide a future library.

To turn the question round another way, in two forms:

  1. What can async/wait do that a future can't?

  2. How will future be improved if async/await is added?


  -- Howard.

On 26 August 2017 at 02:23, Joe Groff <jgroff at apple.com> wrote:

>
> On Aug 25, 2017, at 12:34 AM, Howard Lovatt <howard.lovatt at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>  In particular a future that is cancellable is more powerful that the
> proposed async/await.
>
>
> It's not more powerful; the features are to some degree disjoint. You can
> build a Future abstraction and then use async/await to sugar code that
> threads computation through futures. Getting back to Jakob's example,
> someone (maybe the Clang importer, maybe Apple's framework developers in an
> overlay) will still need to build infrastructure on top of IBActions and
> other currently ad-hoc signalling mechanisms to integrate them into a more
> expressive coordination framework.
>
> -Joe
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.swift.org/pipermail/swift-evolution/attachments/20170826/3be57a92/attachment.html>