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Comment by nwlieb | Hacker News Reader

Could you describe what makes the Google Fibers so nice?

I'm also really curious why they require modifications to the Linux kernel. My first guess would be stronger integration with the IO model at the syscall boundary (similar to io_uring).

Edit: is this the talk your referring to? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXuZi9aeGTw

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You know how the first time you learned about tcp sockets you made a server that spawned a new thread to handle an incoming connection (or maybe not, people learn differently nowadays).

With the fibers implementation you can just do that. It doesn't kill your performance, and you don't need to go to a painful async model just for performance reasons.

Pretty much. You get to pretend inside your fibers that you're actually running threads. IIRC (it's been a while) you also get proper stack trace when something barfs, the importance of which cannot be overstated.

What are they though? Is this a library for an existing language? A runtime scheduler like the one that does goroutines in Go? If it were open sourced, how would I use it?

It’s just a library that allows easier development of C++ servers in the synchronous, thread-per-requests style, similar to working in Go but a bajillion times better because it’s not in Go.

All of the above, and more -- kernel enhancements. See the linked paper, they detail what they do for the kernel side at least.

> or maybe not, people learn differently nowadays

If by “nowadays” you mean ~2000 when I first learned socket programming (using select!)? ;-)

Yes, that's the one. Unfortunately it doesn't show any of the API details that a developer would be exposed to.

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