Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

> Odyssey has sophisticated asynchronous multi-threaded architecture which is driven by custom made coroutine engine: machinarium

Let me find my space helmet. The voice in my head is crying 'architectural astronaut'.

We are forgetting again to ask the important question of "what else did you try, and why didn't it work so you had to write your own?" I think I get the 'why' for pooling. I know a guy at work who struggles a bit with query rate (query speed is great... until it hits the pool limits). I don't know the 'why' for the technology it's built on top of. Lacking that, I see someone wanting to write machinarium and then building something on top of it.

Which doesn't sound like a bad thing at all, until you find a feature the 'thing on top of it' gets wrong which is consistent with the thing the primary authors are most invested in. You can't have that feature because machinarium doesn't want you to have it. Close ticket.

Form always triumphs over function when the architect is invested in their solution and not the user. Making a library that embodies that solution, at least in my experience, vastly amplifies that investment. That also telegraphs the investment, which if you know to look for can tell you 'buyer beware'. Buyer beware.

Machinarium sounds a lot like libuv: https://github.com/libuv/libuv/wiki/Projects-that-use-libuv

Have I got that wrong?

Disclaimer: I worked at Yandex in 2006-2007.

Yandex is a very BIG company in terms of users, requests, data stored etc. It's surely bigger than Twitter, I believe it is bigger than Netflix. It is also algorithms company (like "not content company") So, when Yandex doing something, is mostly doing it because all other options were failed on their load.

Yandex also has a very extensive expertise in C/C++. There is a ClickHouse, there is a CatBoost. I would trust them in their domain.

I respect Yandex a lot. They are fantastic at doing 80% of what Google, Uber, Amazon (combined) do with like 10% of resources - people and otherwise. So their software tends to be super efficient.

They are fantastic at loosing their best talent to the western counterparts. Nothing fantastic at all for a big company within other reaches.

It's not the Yandex' fault, it is a political situation in Russia. IT skills is the best ticket out for honest people today, can't blame them.

Your claim is wrong in that "best talent" part. Though, Yandex, from time to time, loose new grads, sad but true.

Oh well-well, elaborate please about their scale. Bigger than Twitter, bigger then Netflix. Just give us some proof about that.

We were using libevent and had to remove an extra abstraction layer. Machinarium is there for two reasons: 1. Express network protocol state machine as normal control flow. Just to make code simpler. 2. Reduce contention of multithreaded operations. In Machinarium you have coroutines which can yield context not to OS scheduler but to other coroutines. You can organize local data around worker (thread - owner of coroutines) and avoid false cache line sharing.

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