and everybody here Do you think there is value i

Question

< 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 · Answer

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

christophsturm · Answer

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

kirillrakhman · Answer

I agree

Dias · Answer

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 · Answer

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 · Answer

I think it would be valuable

kirillrakhman · Answer

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

streetsofboston · Answer

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 · Answer

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

streetsofboston · Answer

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

christophsturm · Answer

ok if non blocking is not clear what about evented io

gildor · Answer

gt 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 · Answer

gt 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 · Answer

why

gildor · Answer

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

gildor · Answer

sorry misunderstood your message

gildor · Answer

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 · Answer

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