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Gallaxhar
Gallaxhar

Reputation: 1036

Coroutines and handling async in clojure(script) best practices?

There seems to be a myriad of implementations for 'coroutines' or asynchronous logic in clojure, many of the talks by Rich Hickey and other potential authorities on the matter are from almost a decade ago and I'm trying to find out what is the latest and greatest, best practice way to handle this problem.

My favorite abstraction for this type of thing is lua coroutines, but I think these may be a strictly imperative style of doing things, and I'm a little confused as to what the functional way is instead.

In lua though it's really simple and easy with coroutines to:

A) Non-busy wait for X seconds.

B) Non-busy wait for a variable or function to be a specific value, such as true

A can probably be achieved using setTimeout, but B can't really, at least I don't know how. I'm also not sure setTimeout is the best practice for these types of problems?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 415

Answers (1)

Alan Thompson
Alan Thompson

Reputation: 29984

In a 2013 blog post, Rich Hickey describes the motivations for clojure.core.async. While the JVM has some applications, the primary motive was to give the illusion of threads to the single-threaded Javascript environment.

The "simulated multithreading" provided by clojure.core.async is not as robust as using actual JVM threads (especially when Exceptions/Errors occur), so it is of limited use for JVM Clojure. This will be even more true when Java virtual threads become a reality.

So if you are in ClojureScript, clojure.core.async is much better than nothing (i.e. callback hell). However, even JS is contemplating a multithreading model via WebAssembly, so an alternative to clojure.core.async could exist for ClojureScript in the future.

Upvotes: 4

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