dictomaton VS AspNetCoreDiagnosticScenarios

Say you want to compute all strings of length 5 that the automaton can generate. Conceptually the nicest way is to create an automaton that matches any five characters and then compute the intersection between that automaton and the regex automaton. Then you can generate all the strings in the intersection automaton. Of course, IRL, you wouldn't actually generate the intersection (you can easily do this on the fly), but you get the idea.

Automata are really a lost art in modern natural language processing. We used to do things like store a large vocabulary in an deterministic acyclic minimized automaton (nice and compact, so-called dictionary automaton). And then to find, say all words within Levenshtein distance 2 of hacker, create a Levenshtein automaton for hacker and then compute (on the fly) the intersection between the Levenshtein automaton and the dictionary automaton. The language of the automaton is then all words within the intersection automaton.

I wrote a Java package a decade ago that implements some of this stuff:

https://github.com/danieldk/dictomaton

Also related: Levenshtein automata - automata for words that match every word within a given Levenshtein distance. The intersection of a Levenshtein automaton of a word and a DAWG gives you an automaton of all words within the given edit distance.

I haven't done any Java in years, but I made a Java package in 2013 that supports: DAWGs, Levenshtein automata and perfect hash automata:

https://github.com/danieldk/dictomaton

This one is a pretty decent guide - https://github.com/davidfowl/AspNetCoreDiagnosticScenarios/blob/master/AsyncGuidance.md

The C# (mostly applicat community has e.g. https://github.com/davidfowl/AspNetCoreDiagnosticScenarios/blob/master/AsyncGuidance.md written by one of the Asp.Net architects. I found this in this lovely thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36785691 which expresses my views/confusion more clearly than I can express.

No it doesn't, hence why there are best practices guidelines written by the .NET architects, and there was a research project to add Go/Java co-routines as well.

https://github.com/davidfowl/AspNetCoreDiagnosticScenarios/b...

https://twitter.com/davidfowl/status/1532880744732758018?lan...

https://github.com/dotnet/runtimelab/issues/2057

https://github.com/dotnet/runtimelab/issues/2398

They don't work just fine in C#, there is a reason why one of ASP.NET architects has written a guide of best practices.

https://github.com/davidfowl/AspNetCoreDiagnosticScenarios/b...

Many that praise async/await in C#, kind of forget it took about 10 years to spread across all the layer of the language and runtime, since it was done via IL rewriting, it caused several issues with F# async tasks, due to the age of the ecosystem plenty of code isn't async/await friendly and needs to be wrapped into Task.Run() or similar.

There is a best practices guideline from one of the ASP.NET architects, https://github.com/davidfowl/AspNetCoreDiagnosticScenarios/b...

During last year they researched adding Go/Java's approach to .NET, but now it is too late. See the ASP.NET Q&A session at BUILD 2023.

The best guidance I have found was from here: AsyncGuidance.md

To expand upon this thought, here is the AsyncGuidance doc[1] on why not to use .Result to get the return value of a completed Task in C#.

To make this simple they introduced async Main[2] a few years ago.

[1]: https://github.com/davidfowl/AspNetCoreDiagnosticScenarios/b...

Async Guidance