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0 pointsmorelisp3y ago0 comments

> Channel reading and writing is isomorphic to read() and write() syscalls

This is a very bad mental model because channels operations cannot be canceled (without using select on two channels) or return any error status (at all).

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paskozdilar3y ago

While technically true, I don't really see the impact of the difference. It is idiomatic to use contexts for any kind of cancellation during channel operations, and it works well.

The syscall comparison was made to give intuition about general behavior of channels to someone with a background in C. Of course it's not completely identical.

morelispOP3y ago

The ability of read/write to communicate via errors as well as the actual data transferred is significant - there's a reason Go's i/o model is io.Reader/io.Writer and not chan []byte.

You might as well explain channels in terms of any blocking operation if the bar for "isomorphic" (now backtracked to "intuitively" I guess) is that low.

paskozdilar3y ago

I don't know what's the bar for "isomorphism", but I know that the word literally means "same shape", so just because some nerd that got killed in a duel over a girl used the same word in a mathematical context doesn't give him dibs over its general use.

Unless, of course, system calls can be modeled as operators over sets. In which case, please tell me how.

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paskozdilar3y ago

While technically true, I don't really see the impact of the difference. It is idiomatic to use contexts for any kind of cancellation during channel operations, and it works well.

The syscall comparison was made to give intuition about general behavior of channels to someone with a background in C. Of course it's not completely identical.

morelispOP3y ago

The ability of read/write to communicate via errors as well as the actual data transferred is significant - there's a reason Go's i/o model is io.Reader/io.Writer and not chan []byte.

You might as well explain channels in terms of any blocking operation if the bar for "isomorphic" (now backtracked to "intuitively" I guess) is that low.

paskozdilar3y ago

Unless, of course, system calls can be modeled as operators over sets. In which case, please tell me how.

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j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse