asyncly VS cppcoro

One of the main benefits of async/await in Rust is that it can work in situations where you don't even have threads or dynamic memory. You can absolutely use it to write very concise code that's waiting on an interrupt on your microcontroller to have read some data coming in over I2C from some buffer. It's a higher level abstraction that allows your code to use concurrency (mostly) without having tons of interactions with the underlying runtime.

Every major piece of software that I have worked on has implemented this in one form or another (even in non-modern C++ where you don't have any coroutine concepts, Apple's grand central dispatch,). If you don't then your business logic will either be very imperformantly block on IO, have a gazillion of threads that make development/debugging a living hell, or be littered with implementation details of the underlying runtime or a combination of all 3.

If you don't use existing abstractions in the language (or through some library), you will end up building them yourselves, which is hard and probably overall inferior to widely used ones (if there are any). I have done so in the past, see https://github.com/goto-opensource/asyncly.

Keep in mind that these is a really basic building block where you can bring your own runtime and hook coroutines into it, not something that is at all usable out of the box. This is exacerbated by the fact that the C++ standard library is still lacking support for non-blocking futures/promises.

To see how it can be used for actual asynchronous operations on a thread pool, take a look at asyncly, which I co-authored:

https://github.com/LogMeIn/asyncly/blob/master/Test/Unit/fut...

PS: Take a look at cppcoro; this might help as well, especially generator<>, if you're looking to generate numbers, and stuff;

This is the only viable implementation.

Kind of sounds like whatever library you were using provided leaky abstractions. Something like cppcoro provides really good abstractions for coroutines, the user really doesn't need to understand why any of it works.

Is there a usecase for copying/serializing such coroutines? If not, I would use the normal C++20 coroutines (cppcoro?).

C++ has the popular CppCoro library. Async_mutex is its equivalent of Tokio::sync::Mutex, providing exclusive access to data shared between tasks.

Because the whole application is running under a single thread there is no need for atomic operations in synchronization primitives(which most of the time requires seq_cst memory order and CMPXCHG which is an expensive instruction in CPU). for example what async_mutex would look like if it knows it's running in a single-threaded scheduler (a non-atomic state variable and waiters queue).

Maybe not old, but I wish cppcoro was still updated. It was such a nice start!

You can get generator<> from https://github.com/lewissbaker/cppcoro

It is possible to compose them more easily than described in the article; Lewis Baker's cppcoro library for example provides a recursive_generator<> type[0] that allows this without using any macros. It's up to the library part of coroutines to make things easy, end users are not expected to write low-level coroutine code themselves.

I wonder about the allocation elision. Return value optimization became mandatory, and some compilers can already elide calls to new/delete and malloc()/free() in normal code, so perhaps it will be possible to guarantee allocation elision in the future in the most used cases.

[0]: https://github.com/lewissbaker/cppcoro#recursive_generatort