Asynchronous programming

[Paul Rubin]

Marko Rauhamaa <marko at pacujo.net> writes:
> Also, one must be careful with file access, which is necessarily
> blocking on linux (unless Python takes Linux's AIO API into use, which
> would be groundbreaking).

AIO is a possibility for i/o on an already-open file and I think there
may be other ways to do it too.  But there appears to be no way to open
a file without potentially blocking, potentially for a long time on a
busy hard disk or a remote file system.  GHC and Erlang both use a
thread pool to deal with opening disk files.