proposal-explicit-resource-managemen VS opentelemetry-proto

In addition to this, is the new (stage 3 even!)explicit resource management proposal[0], supported by TypeScript version >= 5.2[1]

Though I agree that async context is better fit for this generally, the RMP should be good for telemetry around objects that have defined lifetime semantics, which is a step in the right direction you can use today

[0]: https://github.com/tc39/proposal-explicit-resource-managemen...

[1]: https://www.totaltypescript.com/typescript-5-2-new-keyword-u...

There's a conversation I had with Ron Buckton, the proposal champion, mainly on this specific issue. [1]

Short answer: Yes, Disposable can leak if you forget "using" it. And it will leak if the Disposable is not guarded by advanced GC mechanisms like the FinalizationRegistry.

Unlike C# where it's relatively easier to utilize its GC to dispose undisposed resources [2], properly utilizing FinalizationRegistry to do the same thing in JavaScript is not that simple. In response to our conversation, Ron is proposing adding the use of FinalizationRegistry as a best practice note [3], but only for native handles. It's mainly meant for JS engine developers.

Most JS developers wrapping anything inside a Disposable would not go through the complexity of integrating with FinalizationRegistry, thus cannot gain the same level of memory-safety, and will leak if not "using" it.

IMO this design will cause a lot of problems, misuses and abuses. But making JS to look more like C# is on Microsoft's agenda so they are probably not going to change anything.

[1]: https://github.com/tc39/proposal-explicit-resource-managemen...

I'm not _entirely_ sure which RAII you mean, but if you mean something like C#'s `using` or Java's `try-with-resources` or Python's `with`, then https://github.com/tc39/proposal-explicit-resource-managemen... and https://github.com/tc39/proposal-async-explicit-resource-man... are in stage 3 (of 4 stages) in ECMAScript's language proposal lifecycle and will be coming to a JS engine near you behind a flag soon-ish.

I'd prefer something with a more sound type system, and something that makes cleaning up resources easier and more ergonomic.

This might help with cleanup: https://github.com/tc39/proposal-explicit-resource-managemen...

But I'm not sure anything will help with the type system. For example, this drives me absolutely insane: https://www.typescriptlang.org/play#code/MYewdgziA2CmB00QHMA...

There's a proposal for syntax to help with this in JS, incidentally: https://github.com/tc39/proposal-explicit-resource-managemen...

There is no reason why you could not, in principle, have Rust-style compile-time borrow checking in a managed language.

As an extreme example (that I have occasionally thought about doing though probably won't), you could fork TypeScript and add ownership and lifetime and inherited-mutability annotations to it, and have the compiler enforce single-ownership and shared-xor-mutable except in code that has specifically opted out of this. As with existing features of TypeScript's type system, this wouldn't affect the emitted code at all—heap allocations would still be freed nondeterministically by the tracing GC at runtime, not necessarily at the particular point in the program where they stop being used—but you'd get the maintainability benefits of not allowing unrestricted aliasing.

(Since you wouldn't have destructors, you might need to use linear instead of affine types, to ensure that programmers can't forget to call a resource object's cleanup method when they're done with it. Alternatively, you could require https://github.com/tc39/proposal-explicit-resource-managemen... to be used, once that gets added to JavaScript.)

Of course, if you design a runtime specifically to be targeted by such a language, more becomes possible. See https://without.boats/blog/revisiting-a-smaller-rust/ for one sketch of what this might look like.

Things like https://github.com/tc39/proposal-explicit-resource-managemen.... Essentially better language level support for objects which represent some IO resource that should be reliably closed when a user is done with it. Something like the `defer` statement in Go is really missing from JS.

Maybe, you are asking yourself: "But I already had instrumented my applications with vendor-specific libraries and I'm using their agents and monitoring tools, why should I change to OpenTelemetry?". The answer is: maybe you're right and I don't want to encourage you to update the way how you are doing observability in your applications, that's a hard and complex task. But, if you are starting from scratch or you are not happy with your current observability infrastructure, OpenTelemetry is the best choice, independently of the backend telemetry tool that you are using. I would like to invite you to take a look at the number of exporters available in the collector contrib section, if your backend tracing tool is not there, probably it's already using the Open Telemetry Protocol (OTLP) and you will be able to use the core collector. Otherwise, you should consider changing your backend telemetry tool or contributing to the project creating a new exporter.

Here's the example payloads for OTLP over JSON and example of how to ingest them: https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-proto/tree/m...

An OTLP receiver can receive data via gRPC or HTTP using the OTLP format. There are advanced configurations that you can enable via the YAML file.

Cerbos fully transitioned from OpenCensus to OpenTelemetry, a move that significantly boosts our metrics and tracing capabilities. This shift allows for more efficient integration with a variety of observability products supporting the OpenTelemetry protocol (OTLP) but also offers the flexibility to use push metrics and fine-tune trace sampling. With this update, configuration through the tracing block in Cerbos files is deprecated in favor of using OpenTelemetry environment variables.

Networking is Easy (Really!) Since you install the agent directly into the environment where you are running your application, there is no complex networking. When developing in localMode, the agent listens on the common OpenTelemetry Line Protocol (OTLP) on ports 4317 & 4318 automatically.

Oh nice, thank you (and also solumos) for the links! It looks like oteps/pull/171 (merged June 2023) expanded and superseded the opentelemetry-proto/pull/346 PR (closed Jul 2022) [0]. The former resulted in merging OpenTelemetry Enhancement Proposal 156 [1], with some interesting results especially for 'Phase 2' where they implemented columnar storage end-to-end (see the Validation section [2]):

* For univariate time series, OTel Arrow is 2 to 2.5 better in terms of bandwidth reduction ... and the end-to-end speed is 3.1 to 11.2 times faster

* For multivariate time series, OTel Arrow is 3 to 7 times better in terms of bandwidth reduction ... Phase 2 has [not yet] been .. estimated but similar results are expected.

* For logs, OTel Arrow is 1.6 to 2 times better in terms of bandwidth reduction ... and the end-to-end speed is 2.3 to 4.86 times faster

* For traces, OTel Arrow is 1.7 to 2.8 times better in terms of bandwidth reduction ... and the end-to-end speed is 3.37 to 6.16 times faster

[0]: https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-proto/pull/3...

[1]: https://github.com/open-telemetry/oteps/blob/main/text/0156-...

[2]: https://github.com/open-telemetry/oteps/blob/main/text/0156-...

We then modified the benchmark to encode our example data which is an opentelemetry trace data.