I haven’t actually seen it in the wild yet, just talked about in technical talks from engineers at different studios, but I’m interested in designs in which there isn’t a traditional main thread anymore.
Instead, everything is a job, and even what is considered the main thread is no longer an orchestration thread, but just another worker after some nominal set up between scaffolding enough threads, usually minus one, to all serve as lockless, work-stealing worker threads.
Conventional async programming relies too heavily on a critical main thread.
I think it’s been so successful though, that unfortunately we’ll be stuck with it for much longer than some of us will want.
It reminds me of how many years of inefficient programming we have been stuck with because cache-unfriendly traditional object-oriented programming was so successful.
This sounds like running an event loop per thread instead of 1 event loop with a backing thread pool. Or am I misunderstanding you?
It works great for small tasks but larger tasks block local events and you can get weird latency issues, that was the major tradeoff I ran into when I used it. Works great if your tasks are tiny though, not having the event loop handoff to the worker thread is a good throughput boost. But then we started having latency issues and we introduced larger tasks which would hang the local event loop from getting those events.
I think Scylladb works somewhat like this but does message passing to put certain data on certain threads so any thread can handle incoming events but it still moves the request to the pinned thread the data lives on. One thread can get overwhelmed if your data isn't well distributed.