alt Hacker NewsI am not saying threads are the model for all programming problems. For example a dependency graph like an excel spreadsheet can be analyzed and parallelized.
But as you observed, async/await fails to express concurrency any better. It’s also a thread, it’s just a worse implementation.
That’s incorrect. Even when expressed suboptimally, it still tends to result in overall higher throughput and consistently lower latency (work stealing executors specifically). And when you’re in this world, you can always do an optimization pass to better express the concurrency. If you’ve not written it async to start with, then you’re boned and have no easy escape hatch to optimize with.