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Discussion on: Writing Rust the Elixir way

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tomjoro profile image
Thomas

I love this! I have dabbled with Rust for a few years and have high hopes, and was disappointed when I saw Rust looking more like C# with the async/await stuff - so much complexity. And I'm a big Elixir fan and have used for years.

The discussion that the “OS” can handle only a specific amount of work - I think this means that the underlying HW can only handle a specific amount of work. The problem here is that HW is a moving target, so how do you know what you are running on? With the explosion of multi-core computing it seems every year we are running on computers with more cores - I don’t want to change my code every year.

Using “process” or “threads” is not just about performance optimizations - it’s also about the ease of programming. It’s much easier to write sequential code (do a, do b, do c) rather than break it up into async, await, etc., which brings in lots of complexities. I think Go understands this too.

I don’t understand the idea that massive concurrency only makes sense if you are I/O bound. Concurrency makes sense from 1) programming is easier, and 2) performance when you have more parallelism (which is becoming quite usual).

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tomjoro profile image
Thomas

Just to add to this, I think Rust / Lunatic can do a better job at this than Java Akka. Java Akka and Play, etc., show the limitations and difficulties in isolation.