Discussion

Never snooze a future

ixxie: I thought this was a "carpe diem" motivational post xD

cousin_it: Looks like the code of foo() says "take a lock then sleep for 10 millis", but actually it can take the lock and then sleep forever, depending on how it's polled. Well! This seems like a bug with the async abstraction in Rust then. Or if you don't like "bug", then "disagreement with intuition that will cause bugs forever". Goroutines in Go don't have this problem: if a goroutine says it'll take a lock and sleep for 10 millis, then that's what it'll do. So maybe the lesson I would take is that concurrent programming with locks has to be preemptive; cooperative concurrency + locks = bugs.

rcxdude: I don't think it's preemptive vs cooperative that matters. What Rust's abstraction allows is for a function to act like a mini-executor itself, polling multiple other futures itself instead of delegating it to the runtime. That allows them to contain subtle issues like stopping polling a future without cancelling it, which is, yeah, dangerous if one of those futures can block other futures from running (another way you could come at this is to say that maybe holding locks across async points should be avoided).