Observability or the ability to never get "caught with your pants down"

Hello, new to actually discovering how important trio is thanks to Armin’s recent backpressure essay. Look forward to replacing my crappy error handling code for my worker queue to trio.

One fun and interesting way to describe what structured concurrency is that you can never catch the system “with its pants down”. This is why you can advertise that Ctrl-C actually works in trio. This is super important for building complex systems on top of. Its also a very catchy way to describe trio.

The concept of observability (as the property defined in this thesis here http://fare.tunes.org/tmp/phd/thesis.pdf and a few talks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fH51qhI3hq0) is the more formal way of talking about these kinds of properties. I encourage people to check it out. Lots of comparisons to make to trio’s structured concurrency and the hypothetical uber-runtime of trio + pypy JIT and GC etc. The thesis subsumes a lot of these concepts into a single idea of migration.

1 Like