On Fri, May 11, 2012 at 3:03 AM, Tim Caswell
<tim@creationix.com> wrote:
My only warning [...] Any function call into a third-party library will have the potential to suspend your current coroutine [...] callbacks makes the points where other stuff can happen explicit.
Coroutines make thread switches inconspicuous, which is a bad thing in many^H^H^H^Hsome situations (after years using them extensively, I'm still happily surprised about how rarely they've bitten me).
What coroutines bring you is that your code is organised in a more fluid way: if you want to perform A() as soon as B() has been completed, you want to write it as "A(); B()". Callbacks nested 4 or 5 levels deep are not maintainable, because they're not readable (and they can't even be indented sensibly).
The generic way to overload the instructions chaining operator ";" is the monad, but it's impractically hard to get right without a type system as powerful as Haskell's to assist you. If you want to make thread-switching operations stand out, you can simply make it mandatory to call them in a protected environment:
Turning the latter into the former is really what Haskell's ">>=" operator is all about.
In development mode, of course, it's important that functions which *might* fail *always do* fail, even if no actual rescheduling occurs. Otherwise you get random bugs.That's something Haskell's type system does guarantee, but Lua cannot do so without an additional code-checking tool.
But let me repeat: in practice, I haven't found it necessary to make blocking calls explicit through wait_for()-like protections. Beginners might beg to differ, but hopefully beginners don't write concurrent spaghetti code.
