Asynchronous programming

[Lawrence D’Oliveiro]

On Saturday, August 13, 2016 at 8:26:05 PM UTC+12, Marko Rauhamaa wrote:

> ... (unless Python takes Linux's AIO API into use, which
> would be groundbreaking).

Last I looked, asynchronous I/O on Linux was still a work in progress. The whole POSIX API has been grounded in the assumption that all I/O is blocking--in other words, I/O requests and process scheduling have been inextricably linked. And that has been incorporated into the design of Linux, which they now have to disentangle.

Before I was introduced to Unix/Linux, I was using VMS, where all I/O was inherently asynchronous and decoupled from process scheduling: all the synchronous I/O calls were just userland wrappers that did “queue I/O request” followed by “wait for completion”.