> By async I was referring to node's asynchronous event-driven runtime abstraction which the GP refers to as an ugly hack.
Okay with that clarification I can agree it’s a good model, given its constraints. The event loop with async IO in the abstract is a good way to model a single process/thread workload for many use cases that fit it.
> I'm not sure if this abstraction is better than all of the available alternatives if you compare it to high-level features multi-threaded runtimes offer like thread-safe collections, atomic updates, concurrent hash maps, immutability, structured concurrency, etc... as in Java/Clojure.
Clojure’s solution to concurrency is a breath of fresh air, regardless of your execution environment, because its state transactional semantics are great whether your concurrency is in one process/thread or spread across many. I can’t speak to typical Java solutions, but my general sense is they’re higher level and more powerful than Node’s for actually crossing process/thread boundaries, but subject to most of the shared state problems Java has even in a single process/thread.
> The author of esbuild gave up trying to code esbuild with nodejs/worker threads and switched to Go for a less limited/restricted concurrency environment.
After a lot of exploration of Node worker threads, I’d probably similarly look elsewhere if I had a workload suited to it. You can do a lot with Node worker threads with a lot of special tuning for a use case, and I even have some proof of concept code demonstrating that it can be much better than common usage. But I put it on hold because the complexity of making it perform well is very high compared to optimizing the single thread default.
Okay with that clarification I can agree it’s a good model, given its constraints. The event loop with async IO in the abstract is a good way to model a single process/thread workload for many use cases that fit it.
> I'm not sure if this abstraction is better than all of the available alternatives if you compare it to high-level features multi-threaded runtimes offer like thread-safe collections, atomic updates, concurrent hash maps, immutability, structured concurrency, etc... as in Java/Clojure.
Clojure’s solution to concurrency is a breath of fresh air, regardless of your execution environment, because its state transactional semantics are great whether your concurrency is in one process/thread or spread across many. I can’t speak to typical Java solutions, but my general sense is they’re higher level and more powerful than Node’s for actually crossing process/thread boundaries, but subject to most of the shared state problems Java has even in a single process/thread.
> The author of esbuild gave up trying to code esbuild with nodejs/worker threads and switched to Go for a less limited/restricted concurrency environment.
After a lot of exploration of Node worker threads, I’d probably similarly look elsewhere if I had a workload suited to it. You can do a lot with Node worker threads with a lot of special tuning for a use case, and I even have some proof of concept code demonstrating that it can be much better than common usage. But I put it on hold because the complexity of making it perform well is very high compared to optimizing the single thread default.