#ElixirLang devs, do you use any naming conventions for async calls? It’d be handy to quickly tell if a given function call finishes everything before the next one, or whether it starts some background tasks that need to be taken into account. #ergonomiccode - ThreadSky

mxgrn.com • 124 days ago

#ElixirLang devs, do you use any naming conventions for async calls?

It’d be handy to quickly tell if a given function call finishes everything before the next one, or whether it starts some background tasks that need to be taken into account.

#ergonomiccode

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pmarino.dev•124 days ago

I personally do not think it makes a difference because thinking of all calls being somewhat blocking makes reasoning about the overall code more easy for me.

Then again it depends what you mean by “async” calls

mxgrn.com•124 days ago

Yeah, I should clarify that by 'async' I meant any call that 'behind the scenes' sends a message to a process, which makes it suddenly non-blocking and can have consequences like race conditions.

pmarino.dev•124 days ago

In that case I think is basically a different problem because processes handle messages sequentially anyways. If the outcome of the message is that the current process receives another one that would still be processed afterwards. I am not sure how knowing it upfront would change the final behaviour

andrewtimberlake.com•124 days ago

I’m not sure that I have any function calls that might be confused in that way.
Bamboo (the email library) has
- deliver/1
- deliver_later/1

mxgrn.com•124 days ago

Uff, Elixir can be hard to talk about succinctly :)

Take a call like `Games.finish(game)` followed by something like `Notifications.broadcast_score(game)` on the very next line.

Does `finish/1` do anything async, like sending a message to a process? Would be great to know.

andrewtimberlake.com•123 days ago

Looking at your example, I would assume that Games.finish/1 must return a game (struct) otherwise you wouldn’t be able to broadcast the score that would be determined by the game conclusion. Therefore, any async work within finish would need to be resolved before returning, right?

andrewtimberlake.com•123 days ago

If it did or didn’t, how would that change what you do next?
If it was something you could control, then it should probably return a task which you can then wait on.

andyleclair.dev•123 days ago

If the next function call doesn't receive any parameters from the previous one it shouldn't need to know anything about the implementation of what's inside the previous function. "If the function call finishes" excuse me sir this is not JavaScript

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