sync

Steve Klabnik walks through the history of Rust and how its design evolved toward async/await, including the alternatives tried and dropped. He also discusses the difficulty of adding a major feature to a language.

Without Boats, a Rust language team member, explains the design of Rust's async/await at RustLatam 2019. He covers the history and constraints behind zero-cost, allocation-free async state machines.

Zig creator Andrew Kelley's RedisConf 2020 talk on modeling data flow with asynchronous I/O in Zig. It explains how Zig's async/await avoids function coloring, and Loris Cro demonstrates OkRedis, a zero-allocation Redis client.

Nathaniel J. Smith's PyCon 2018 talk introducing Trio, a Python concurrency library designed around usability and structured concurrency. He live-codes a problem and analyzes pitfalls in other async libraries.

A Netflix JavaScript talk on using Reactive Extensions (Rx) for asynchronous UI code. It covers Observables, composing events such as drag and drop, and sequencing Ajax requests.

Neil Fraser of Google presents Differential Synchronization, the algorithm behind MobWrite, for keeping multiple copies of a document in sync in real time. The talk argues the approach is robust, convergent and efficient.

Jonathan Worthington's YAPC Asia 2015 talk on parallelism, concurrency and asynchrony in Perl 6. It covers the language's concurrency features.

Technology Connections explains why car turn signals appear to drift out of sync at stoplights and how thermal and other flasher designs work. It also covers how synchronization could be achieved.

Philip Roberts explains the JavaScript event loop, call stack, callbacks and asynchronous behavior with live visualizations using a tool he built. It demystifies terms like non-blocking and single-threaded.

Pink Floyd's Echoes played in sync with the final Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite segment of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. The song's length closely matches the sequence.

Ryan Dahl's JSConf EU talk introducing Node.js to the world. He explains the motivation for event-driven, non-blocking I/O, with JavaScript chosen mainly for its asynchronous nature.

A FOSDEM 2023 talk from the Matrix team on Matrix 2.0, covering sliding sync, the Element X client rewrite and next-generation calling. It explains how Matrix aims to match the speed of proprietary messengers.

Martin Kleppmann's Local-First Conf talk reviewing where the local-first idea came from, where it stands five years after the essay, and what the community should work toward. He argues for generic sync infrastructure.

Ron Pressler's Curry On 2015 talk arguing that imperative languages should not be polluted with pure functional concepts like monads. He favors simple blocking code over non-blocking styles.

Dan Abramov's JSConf Iceland talk on what came after React 16, with live-coded prototypes of async rendering and time slicing. It previews the ideas that became concurrent mode and suspense.

A Clojure/conj 2014 talk by Lucas Cavalcanti and Edward Wible on four uses of Datomic. They cover HTTP caching, audit trails, mobile database sync and authorization, drawing on the immutable transaction log.

Paul Turner of Google presents kernel interfaces for user-level scheduling of real threads, aiming at a uniform synchronous programming model across C++, Java, Go and Python. It introduces the switchto-style system calls behind Google's fibers.

James Long's dotJS 2019 talk on how CRDTs enable local-first apps and how simple they can be to implement. He shows how to use them to build robust offline-capable frontends.

Ryan Dahl's first presentation of Node.js at JSConf 2009. He pitches event-driven, non-blocking I/O as the motivation, rather than JavaScript itself.

Erlang co-creator Joe Armstrong's Code BEAM SF 2018 keynote revisits good ideas from the history of computing that were dropped, and asks which should be revived. It also touches on Erlang and Elixir.

Edwin Brady presents Idris 2, a rewrite of the Idris dependently typed language, and shows type-driven development in practice. The demos show the compiler filling in whole functions from their types.

Joe Armstrong, creator of Erlang, and Jeremy Ruston, creator of TiddlyWiki, discuss hypertext, Ted Nelson's idea of intertwingled knowledge, and a way to combine TiddlyWiki with Erlang. It is a Code Mesh LDN 2018 talk.

Jose Valim introduces Nx, the project bringing numerical computing to Elixir, covering multi-dimensional tensors, automatic differentiation and JIT compilation to CPU and GPU.

ElixirConf EU 2023 talk by Giuseppe Castagna and Guillaume Duboc on bringing set-theoretic types to Elixir, and the benefits such a type system could offer such as catching bugs.

Chuck Moore, inventor of Forth, presents GreenArrays' 144-core asynchronous chip at Strange Loop 2013. He explains how idle cores draw almost no power and how tight code minimizes energy use.

Ben Eater explains how VGA signals work and builds a breadboard circuit that produces correct sync timing so a monitor recognizes the signal. He then builds toward displaying an image from simple logic chips.

Zach Tellman's Clojure West talk covers the basics of queueing theory and its practical use in systems, including backpressure, how queues break down under load, and pitfalls of naive core.async use.

Martin Kleppmann's QCon London 2018 talk on keeping data consistent in distributed systems without a central leader. It surveys CRDT algorithms for syncing devices and collaborative editing over peer-to-peer networks.

Simon Knowles, co-founder and CTO of Graphcore, talks about "intelligence processors", chips designed specifically for machine learning. The talk was given at the RAAIS 2017 summit and covers Graphcore's architecture.

Timothy Baldridge presents Pixie, a lightweight Lisp built on RPython, at Strange Loop 2015. It covers C interop, immutable data structures, fast startup and async-by-default IO.

Netflix engineer Drew Gallatin's EuroBSDcon 2022 talk quantifies the older FreeBSD optimizations that let Netflix serve web traffic at 800Gb/s, including TSO, LRO, VM page cache zones, asynchronous sendfile and unmapped mbufs.