So while I'm in the process of running a large asynchronous event-driven product in a VM in another window, it's a good time to read all sorts of things about asynchronous programming.
Frankly, I'm not a huge fan of it, but Chris is, and he's a better programmer than me, so we'll leave it at that. Largely, I think people are fans of Async because most languages and kernels are terrible at threads. Python, for example, does not have threads. "No worky worky", as we say around here. The downside of async is that it is basically impossible to debug, and you need a programmer as good as Chris to even begin to use it well. Likewise, the locking/blocking problems don't go away, they just get mapped into a more inscrutable form. So for systems that have working threads, you use them for anything IO-heavy (aka, web servers/crawlers/other useful hacking tools). But since almost no system HAS working, scalable, threads, people get excited about async. And then you spend your whole life saying "Hey, this thing I do sometimes has to do a lot of work on the CPU, so let's put it in another thread please". Or "Hey, this whole giant DB library we have to use isn't built from the ground up to use Async, so we need it to be in its own thread and manage a feeder Queue to it". And then eventually you're like "Why on earth am I spending so much time worrying about how efficient an algorithm that runs on one machine is?" and you go off and build something that scales horizontally onto multiple machines. (Where "multiple" is > 100). But in the meantime you have things like asyncore and Node.js and stuff. I can't do them justice, but these posts below are the funniest thing you'll read since Steve Yegge <http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/>. http://teddziuba.com/2011/10/node-js-is-cancer.html http://teddziuba.com/2011/10/straight-talk-on-event-loops.html http://www.unlimitednovelty.com/2011/10/nodejs-has-jumped-shark.html -dave -- INFILTRATE 2012 January 12th-13th in Miami - the world's best offensive information security conference. www.infiltratecon.com
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