while (true) already doesn't stack overflow.
we can add a guard to nextTick() to make it though, it shouldn't be hard. let's
assume it's part of the change and move on.
-1 on more API, especially for behavior that everyone assumes is what
nextTick() does. This is like == and === all over again.
On May 26, 2012, at May 26, 20129:30 PM, Tim Caswell wrote:
> There are already many ways to starve/block the event loop.
>
> You could have an infinite loop
>
> while (true) {}
>
> Or a recursive loop that blocks till the stack overflows
>
> function a() {
> a();
> }
> a();
>
> Now these new semantics would add another way to do the recursive loop,
> except this time the trampoline is built in and the stack doesn't overflow.
>
> function a() {
> process.nextTick(a);
> }
> a();
>
> If we're worried about changing the name to match the meaning and we're
> worried about breaking existing code (I know I have some that accidentally
> depends on the non-blocking nature), we could add a new function
> process.afterTick that does the new semantics and deprecate process.nextTick.
>
> Then no code breaks and we eventually get the right behavior with the right
> name.
>
>
> On Sat, May 26, 2012 at 10:40 PM, Mikeal Rogers <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
>
> On May 26, 2012, at May 26, 20128:16 PM, Jorge wrote:
>>
>> It would mean there's one more thing that can go wrong: the way it's now
>> it's ~ impossible to block the event loop (*), the way you're proposing you
>> could.
>
> That's one way to look at it.
>
> Another way would be to say that there is already something that can go wrong
> when people make the assumption that no IO will fire before their nextTick()
> hander, which is an assumption most people make although I doubt there are
> many cases where the assumption not being true will break something.
>
> This gives us a true assumption, which is a feature. In my opinion, it's a
> better feature than this edge case where you block the event loop (although I
> think we should put in a guard for it so that we can throw a nice exception).
>
> -Mikeal
>
