This is what happens when coders are rushing to code without real understanding what they are doing and why. What is worse - they borrow "features" without understanding from amateur JavaScript projects or C#.
What a bloated mess. This is clearly the second system syndrome, described in the Mystical Man-month.
In good old times futures were macros on top of delay and force special forms, and explicit message passing a-la Erlang would do the job.
C# does all this stuff far clearer and cleaner (and probably more performant).
If they had taken more ideas from C# (especially ExecutionContexts), a lot of his complaints would fade away. He actually explicitly calls this out towards the bottom of the essay.
What a confused comment. You're saying its bad because it's borrowed hastily from other languages, and a better solution is... borrowing features from Erlang?
Not at all. Erlang's approach to concurrency has been well-researched and validated (Akka).
Async, await and friends are mere standardized kludges - popular syntactic sugar without clear semantics and real world connection (explicit message passing mimics how biological systems do self-regulation).
So called enterprise languages, especially C++ are full of similar stuff (kludges).
> popular syntactic sugar without clear semantics and real world connection
Uhh... the point of them is that its as close to the semantics of synchronous code as possible. That's the 'real world connection' - your single threaded code can become asynchonous with just a few keyword changes. Rather than "sendRequest()" you do "await sendRequest()".
Second System Syndrome would be if all of this had been jammed into the 3.0 release, eight years ago.
It's clear that the async story stumbled into a tarpit after that, but I would be very surprised if it wasn't straightened out eventually into a clean syntax & implementation.
Although it will undoubtedly take longer than anyone would like to deprecate the crufty bits.
What a bloated mess. This is clearly the second system syndrome, described in the Mystical Man-month.
In good old times futures were macros on top of delay and force special forms, and explicit message passing a-la Erlang would do the job.