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Comment by ethegwo | Hacker News Reader

Good job! Exposing state could make any async function 'pure'. All the user needs to do is push the state machine to the next state. I have tried to bind OpenSSL to async Rust before, its async API follows a similar design.

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I did some quick research and found that there is an "async job" API in OpenSSL. That one appears to do IO though, it even says that creating a job is a very expensive operation and thus jobs should be reused.

Is the similarity you are seeing that the work itself that gets scheduled via a job is agnostic over how it is executed?

From this example [0] it looks more like that async API is very similar to Rust's futures:

- Within a job you can access a "wait context"

- You can suspend on some condition

- You can trigger a wake-up to continue executing

[0]: https://www.openssl.org/docs/man1.1.1/man3/ASYNC_is_capable....

Yes, you're right. It's not entirely similar, it's not IO-less. But in async Rust (or any other stackless coroutine runtimes), IO should be bound to the scheduler. This allows IO events callback scheduler and wake the task it binds to. Exposing and manually pushing state is a good way to decouple IO from the scheduler.

Yes! Decoupling is the goal of this! Using non-blocking IO is still useful in this case because it means we can wait on two conditions at once (i.e. socket IO and time), see [0].

It is possible to do the same blocking IO but it feels a little less natural: You have to set the read-timeout on the socket to the time when you need to wake-up the state machine.

[0]: https://github.com/firezone/sans-io-blog-example/blob/99df77...

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