[Semi-OT] Fibers vs. Async / Await

[René Zwanenburg]

On Thursday, 12 May 2022 at 06:04:06 UTC, bauss wrote:
> You don't have to have a "Task" type that you declare, it could 
> simply be T and then the function is just marked async and T 
> automatically becomes Task!T.

That would help a little. Doesn't get rid of the await though.

> It's easy to fix, don't allow implicit conversions between 
> Task!T and T and thus whenever you attempt to use the result 
> you're forced to await it because otherwise you'd get an error 
> from the compiler due to mismatching types.

Right. .Net doesn't do implicit conversion either, I was thinking 
of functions that are void / just Task, like writing to a 
database. Assuming you use exceptions to report problems.

> It doesn't really put anymore pressure on the GC. The compiler 
> converts your code to a state machine and that hardly adds any 
> overhead. It makes your functions somewhat linear, that's it. 
> It doesn't require many more allocations, at least not more 
> than fibers.

Are you sure about this? The state machine needs to be stored 
somewhere. I'd think we would need something similar to a 
delegate: a fixed-size structure that can be passed around, with 
a pointer to a variable sized context / state machine living on 
the heap.