Re: Idea for an event loop library

[Rob Hoelz <rob@...>]

On Fri, May 11, 2012 at 09:56:50AM -0500, Tim Caswell wrote:
> ...
>
> The one thing faux blocking never did for me is parallel work.  I like my
> logic to be as parallel as possible to reduce latency for the http request
> (or whatever operation I'm working on).  Using coroutines to make
> non-blocking calls appear as sequential blocking calls is great for when
> you want to do things in sequence. (though I would argue named callbacks
> using JS hoisting is just as easy)  But for doing things in parallel, it's
> rather lacking.  Maybe the best is a hybrid of using coroutines when they
> make sense and callbacks for other stuff.

The way I would allow this is via a waitall function:

  local ev1 = ev:go(function()
    -- do some work, like make an HTTP request or something
  end)

  local ev2 = ev:go(function()
    -- do some other work, like order pizza, I don't know
  end)

  ev:waitall(ev1, ev2)

waitall would only yield control to the calling coroutine once ev1 and
ev2 are complete.  I would probably have a waitany as well, which would
yield control once at least one of the events is complete.

>
> ...