The cost of queue architecture, and why upfront payment will pay dividends - Ayende @ Rahien

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2021-08-18 20:30:03

I wrote a post a couple of weeks ago called: Architecture foresight: Put a queue on that. I got an interesting comment from Mike Tomaras on the post that deserve its own post in reply.

Even though the benefits of an async queue are indisputable, I will respectfully point out that you brush over or ignore the drawbacks.

I think we agree that your sync code example is much easier to reason about than your async one. "Well, it is a bit more complex to manage in the user interface", "And you can play games on the front end" hides a lot of complexity in the FE to accommodate async patterns.

Your "At more advanced levels" section presents no benefits really, doing these things in a sync pattern is exactly the same as in async, the complexity is moved to the infrastructure instead of the code.

This is a great discussion, and I agree with Mike that there are additional costs to using the async option compared to the synchronous one. There is a really good reason why pretty much all modern languages has something similar to async/await, after all. And anyone who did any work with Node.js and promises without that knows exactly what are the cost of trying to keep the state of the system through multiple levels of callbacks.