Re: Asynchronous

[Meta <0xmeta () gmail com>]

I too fell down the asynchronous rabbit hole where, along the way, I
discovered coroutines. Although somewhat archaic, they have been around a
long time and seem to me considerably easier to read and debug. If you are
interested in exploring a somewhat different approach you are more than
welcome to check out the Python library I wrote to learn about them. The
code is still very beta but hopefully easy to use.

http://rootfoo.org/blackmamba

--meta

On Wed, Oct 5, 2011 at 6:42 PM, Isaac Dawson <isaac.dawson () gmail com> wrote:

> I find Twisted python (http://www.twistedmatrix.com) very easy to debug
> once you understand how Deferred work. Especially if you're using their unit
> test framework Trial. I will definitely agree you that you end up spending a
> lot of time porting non-async code into your async stuff, to the point where
> you become kind of obsessed with it. With twisted you're feeder Queue
> example is as simple as deferToThread() and then praying you don't have any
> locking problems :D.
>
> On Thu, Oct 6, 2011 at 1:38 AM, Dave Aitel <dave () immunityinc com> wrote:
>
> >  So while I'm in the process of running a large asynchronous event-driven
> > product in a VM in another window, it's a good time to read all sorts of
> > things about asynchronous programming.
> >
> > Frankly, I'm not a huge fan of it, but Chris is, and he's a better
> > programmer than me, so we'll leave it at that. Largely, I think people are
> > fans of Async because most languages and kernels are terrible at threads.
> > Python, for example, does not have threads. "No worky worky", as we say
> > around here.
> >
> > The downside of async is that it is basically impossible to debug, and you
> > need a programmer as good as Chris to even begin to use it well. Likewise,
> > the locking/blocking problems don't go away, they just get mapped into a
> > more inscrutable form.
> >
> > So for systems that have working threads, you use them for anything
> > IO-heavy (aka, web servers/crawlers/other useful hacking tools). But since
> > almost no system HAS working, scalable, threads, people get excited about
> > async.  And then you spend your whole life saying "Hey, this thing I do
> > sometimes has to do a lot of work on the CPU, so let's put it in another
> > thread please". Or "Hey, this whole giant DB library we have to use isn't
> > built from the ground up to use Async, so we need it to be in its own thread
> > and manage a feeder Queue to it".
> >
> > And then eventually you're like "Why on earth am I spending so much time
> > worrying about how efficient an algorithm that runs on one machine is?" and
> > you go off and build something that scales horizontally onto multiple
> > machines. (Where "multiple" is > 100).
> >
> > But in the meantime you have things like asyncore and Node.js and stuff. I
> > can't do them justice, but these posts below are the funniest thing you'll
> > read since Steve Yegge <http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/>.
> >
> > http://teddziuba.com/2011/10/node-js-is-cancer.html
> > http://teddziuba.com/2011/10/straight-talk-on-event-loops.html
> > http://www.unlimitednovelty.com/2011/10/nodejs-has-jumped-shark.html
> >
> > -dave
> >
> > --
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> > conference.www.infiltratecon.com
> >
> >
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