@KitRedgrave async / await makes this a bit better in javascript

BUT STILL

the right answer is to have coroutines (ideally by delimited continuations) in a way that's much more cleanly baked into the language

Racket / Guile do this in a sane way. async stuff can be made completely clean and look like everyday straightahead coding.

Every time I program in javascript I get so angry because of this.

@cwebber @KitRedgrave I love Simon Tatham's "Coroutines in C", have you seen that?

https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/coroutines.html

It's so delightfully horrifying, and made even better/worse by the follow-up:

https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/mp/

Anyway there are an amazing variety of ways to do this kind of thing in many languages and I love them all and want everybody to see them 😅

@cwebber @KitRedgrave I managed hack something like co-routines in by abusing self-modifying eval code. For a while in chrome could be tricked into spawning sub processes that communicated with the main thread via shared-webworkers. it was a nightmare of monkeypatching+AOP that ended up acting similarly to how yeild converts a python function into a generator object.

It was ran via a statemachine that would self-modify the functions by reasigning new function on the fly.

@cwebber @KitRedgrave P.s. Don't do this.

@KitRedgrave I really like the perspective in "Events Can Make Sense" (https://www.usenix.org/conference/2007-usenix-annual-technical-conference/events-can-make-sense) for this. It's academic work out of OkCupid, which is kind of fascinating all by itself? But they did a C++ thing that the paper is about, and also a JavaScript version (https://github.com/maxtaco/tamejs).

I didn't know USENIX had the video of their 2007 talk up though, I may have to go watch that...

@KitRedgrave yeah react does that with redux