One thing that came out of playing around with coroutines is that I eventually realized that callstacks are a bit annoying. It’s one of these things where it’s difficult to convince people because callstacks are equivalent in power to any other form of organizing your program flow. But I think that callstacks constantly force us into solving two puzzles: 1. How to split some sequential, blocking, code up into several smaller pieces of non-blocking code because the function has to return quickly. 2. Where to store an object (or keep track of an object) because it is long-lived but the current scope has to be short-lived.
If you’ve been programming for a while you are really good at solving both of these puzzles because you solve them all the time. Which is another reason for why it’s difficult to convince people that it’s worth looking into alternatives: If you are a programmer today, these don’t seem that complicated to you.
But I want to investigate how much can be gained by looking at different approaches to call stacks. I think the potential gains are huge, because this is such a core piece of programming.
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Probably Dance 