How would you feel about changing the semantics of process.nextTick
such that the nextTick queue is *always* cleared after every v8
invocation, guaranteeing that a nextTick occurs before any IO can
happen?
This would imply that you can starve the event loop by doing nextTick.
So, for example, the timeout would never fire in this code:
setTimeout(function () {
console.log('timeout')
})
process.nextTick(function f () {
process.nextTick(f)
})
Reasoning:
We have some cases in node where we use a nextTick to give the user a
chance to add event handlers before taking some action. However,
because we do not execute nextTick immediately (since that would
starve the event loop) you have very rare situations where IO can
happen in that window.
Also, the steps that we go through to prevent nextTick starvation, and
yet try to always have nextTick be as fast as possible, results in
unnecessarily convoluted logic.
This isn't going to change for v0.8, but if no one has a use-case
where it's known to break, we can try it early in v0.9.
