<@U2E974ELT> and everybody here: Do you think ther...

# coroutines

[kirillrakhman]

@elizarov and everybody here: Do you think there is value in educating devs about the difference between
- async as in OS-level async IO and
- async as in doing a blocking call on a thread pool
?
Both approaches unblock the calling (main) thread but I think the scaling characteristics are way different. Maybe it's not that important on a client but on the server you should be able to get way more concurrency using true OS-level asynchronicity which requires the proper libraries.

[gildor]

I think it's very important (and not so obvious) knowledge for a developer, especially for a backend develper

[christophsturm]

i think if you say non blocking its clear that you mean the first definition

[kirillrakhman]

I agree

[Dias]

not really, most of the people I talked to (including myself) thought that non blocking call is done via offloading it to some kind of thread pool

[kirillrakhman]

The reason I'm asking is because at KotlinConf even some of the speakers didn't seem to address (not to say understand) the difference

[Dias]

I think it would be valuable

[kirillrakhman]

It would be useful to have some benchmarks to demonstrate the difference

[streetsofboston]

The way suspend and async is handled was quite nicely explained by Roman during the workshop on Wednesday.

But it sure could receive some more prominence to explain the differences.

[kirillrakhman]

I'm not talking about the async builder function specifically. I'm talking about async programming in general.

[streetsofboston]

Sorry, i should not have put the suspend and async in back-quotes.. I also was talking about general suspending/async programming.

[christophsturm]

ok if non blocking is not clear, what about “evented io”?

[gildor]

The way suspend and async is handled was quite nicely explained by Roman during the workshop on Wednesday.

both of those approaches actually not related directly to real non-blocking code or just to offloading blocking code to another thread (I mean both of them can handle both types of async code)

[gildor]

i think if you say non blocking its clear that you mean the first definition

It’s actually wrong assumption. especially for highload development sorry, misread the message of Christoph, I thought that he talking about option 2

[christophsturm]

why?

[gildor]

because has very different level of scalability. There are real non-blocking api and just blocking API wrapped to threads/pools

[gildor]

sorry, misunderstood your message

[gildor]

of course, I agree that non-blocking is only 1st option and second usually just called “async”, but I still think that a lot of people don’t understand this difference

[christophsturm]

yeah i just wanted to say while you can call both async you can only call the first variant non blocking or evented