Re: Asynchronous event loop brainstorm at FSF 30

[Christopher Allan Webber]

Mikael Djurfeldt writes:

> Den 4 okt 2015 02:30 skrev "Christopher Allan Webber" <
> address@hidden>:
>>  - This would be like asyncio or node.js, asynchronous but *not* OS
>>    thread based (it's too much work to make much of Guile fit around
>>    that for now)
>
> Why is this (too much work for threads)?

Threads bring a lot of risky problems.  I really don't want to deal with
that much locking.  A lot of Guile's code isn't thread-safe... if we
wanted to go to the "oh yeah super safe with threads!" direction,
it might require something like Clojure's software transactional
memory.  I talked to Mark Weaver about this; it's very expensive to do,
super hard to implement (I don't think we have any guile devs
interested), and makes things slower whenever you *aren't* using
threads.

The asyncio / node.js style of things can solve IO bound problems.  As
for CPU bound, we can use message passing between threads or processes.

It's beneficial to focus on message passing for CPU bound issues anyway,
because this means that our code will be able to span across machines,
if said messages are serializable.

Does that make sense?
 - Chris