Async seems like an underbaked idea across the board. Regular code was already async. When you need to wait for an async operation, the thread sleeps until ready and the kernel abstracts it away. But We didn’t like structuring code into logical threads, so we added callback systems for events. Then realized callbacks are very hard to reason about and that sequential control is better.

So threads was the right programming model.

Now language runtimes prefer “green threads” for portability and performance but most languages don’t provide that properly. Instead we have awkward coloring of async/non-async and all these problems around scheduling, priority, and no-preemption. It’s a worse scheduling and process model than 1970.

> Regular code was already async. When you need to wait for an async operation, the thread sleeps until ready and the kernel abstracts it away

Not really. I’ve observed async code often is written in such a way that it doesn’t maximize how much concurrency can be expressed (eg instead of writing “here’s N I/O operations to do them all concurrently” it’s “for operation X, await process(x)”). However, in a threaded world this concurrency problem gets worse because you have no way to optimize towards such concurrency - threads are inherently and inescapably too heavy weight to express concurrency in an efficient way.

This is is not a new lesson - work stealing executors have long been known to offer significantly lower latency with more consistent P99 than traditional threads. This has been known since forever - in the early 00s this is why Apple developed GCD. Threads simply don’t provide any richer information it needs in the scheduler to the kernel about the workload and kernel threads are an insanely heavy mechanism for achieving fine grained concurrency and even worse when this concurrency is I/O or a mixed workload instead of pure compute that’s embarrassingly easily to parallelize.

Do all programs need this level of performance? No, probably not. But it is significantly more trivial to achieve a higher performance bar and in practice achieve a latency and throughput level that traditional approaches can’t match with the same level of effort.

You can tell async is directionally kind of correct in that io_uring is the kernel’s approach to high performance I/O and it looks nothing like traditional threading and syscalls and completion looks a lot closer to async concurrency (although granted exploiting it fully is much harder in an async world because async/await is an insufficient number of colors to express how async tasks interrelate)

> the thread sleeps until ready and the kernel abstracts it away.

Sure, but once you involve the kernel and OS scheduler things get 3 to 4 orders of magnitude slower than what they should be.

The last time I was working on our coroutine/scheduling code creating and joining a thread that exited instantly was ~200us, and creating one of our green threads, scheduling it and waiting for it was ~400ns.

You don't need to wait 10 years for someone else to design yet another absurdly complex async framework, you can roll your own green threads/stackful coroutines in any systems language with 20 lines of ASM.

I think that callbacks are actually easier to reason about:

When it comes time to test your concurrent processing, to ensure you handle race conditions properly, that is much easier with callbacks because you can control their scheduling. Since each callback represents a discrete unit, you see which events can be reordered. This enables you to more easily consider all the different orderings.

Instead with threads it is easy to just ignore the orderings and not think about this complexity happening in a different thread and when it can influence the current thread. It isn't simpler, it is simplistic. Moreover, you cannot really change the scheduling and test the concurrent scenarios without introducing artificial barriers to stall the threads or stubbing the I/O so you can pass in a mock that you will then instrument with a callback to control the ordering...

The problem with callbacks is that the call stack when captured isn't the logical callstack unless you are in one of the few libraries/runtimes that put in the work to make the call stacks make sense. Otherwise you need good error definitions.

You can of course mix the paradigms and have the worst of both worlds.

The problem comes from trying to sit on both chairs: we want async but want to be able to opt out. This is what causes most of the ugliness, including function colouring. Just look at golang, where everything is async with no way to change it, it's great. It's, probably, not well-suited for things like microcontrollers, where every byte matters, but if you can afford the overhead, it's so much better than Rust async. Before async Rust was an interesting and reasonable language, now it's just a hot mess that makes your eyes bleed for no reason.

Threads are neither better or worse than async+callbacks. They are different. There are problems which map nicely to threads and there are problems which are much nicer to express with async.

> So threads was the right programming model.

For problems that aren't overly concerned with performance/memory, yes. You should probably reach for threads as a default, unless you know a priori that your problem is not in this common bucket.

Unfortunately there is quite a lot of bookkeeping overhead in the kernel for threads, and context switches are fairly expensive, so in a number of high performance scenarios we may not be able to afford kernel threading

As I understand, "green threads" are also expensive, for example you either need to allocate a large stack for each "thread", or hook stack allocation to grow the stack dynamically (like Go does), and if you grow the stack, you might have to move it and cannot have pointers to stack objects.

You don’t have threads on embedded, but you want a way to express concurrent waiting. Different problems altogether

Proper modern languages offer both, you can keep your threads and reach out to async only when it makes sense to do.

Now the languages that don't offer choice is another matter.

What is kernel in this context?

I’m just waiting for them to try co-operative multithreading again.

I think you are correct, in so far that often N:M threading is overkill for the problem at hand. However, some IO bound problems truly do require it. I haven't kept up with the details, but AFAIK the fallout from Spectre and Meltdown also means context switches are more expensive than they were historically, which is another downside with regular threads.

I also want to address something that I've seen in several sub-threads here: Rust's specific async implementation. The key limitation, compared to the likes of Go and JS, is that Rust attempts to implement async as a zero-cost abstraction, which is a much harder problem than what Go and JS does. Saying some variant of "Rust should just do the same thing as Go", is missing the point.