Ryan Tomayko

How do we kick our synchronous addiction? —

Eric Florenzano asks why modern web frameworks insist on a synchronous programming model and gives some answers with possible alternatives. The article is dead on, IMO, but I’m not sold on his conclusion:

We need to look at these alternative implementations like coroutines and lightweight processes, so that we can make asynchronous programming as easy as synchronous programming.

For Ruby, this is all about making Fiber robust and widely available. There was a time when I too thought this would solve all problems by hiding the underlying async model but retaining its benefits. That’s the dream. I don’t believe in it anymore. Having experimented with such an approach on a small team, I’m fairly confident that everybody working on an event-based/async program needs to understand the underlying model or blocking code will inevitably be introduced and destroy everything. And once everyone’s comfy with async, you’ll find that the sync façade is annoying and unhelpful. Embrace it.

Tornado on Twisted —

Dustin Sallings proofs out an implementation of the recently released Tornado web framework but builds on top of Twisted. The result is -1,297 fewer lines and all the benefits of having the Twisted framework underneath. I’ve been waiting for someone from the Ruby community to announce a port — we’re good at stealing. Using Dustin’s fork as a reference and basing a Ruby implementation on EventMachine might be the way to go.

Why Events Are A Bad Idea (for high-concurrency servers) —

I want to believe!