Coroutines in Zsh [Sunday, 2012-10-21]

While thinking about how to implement the Window Manager in Zsh, I had to come up with a nice way to handle the socket handling loop outside in background and to have as main loop the event handling one.

While researching I found out about coprocesses in Zsh, which are very awesome.

They basically create a duplex pipe with a process that runs in background, so it’s like having an implicit message queue that you can access by using {print,read} -p.

Following is a stupid example that generates random numbers in parallel and yields them to the main process.

Here’s it in Go:

package main

import (
  "fmt"
  "time"
  "math/rand"
)

func main() {
  rand.Seed(time.Now().UnixNano())

  c := make(chan int);

  go func() {
    for {
      c <- rand.Int() % 32767

      time.Sleep(1000 * time.Millisecond)
    }
  }();

  for {
    fmt.Printf("Here's a random number: %d\n", <-c)
  }
}

And here’s in Zsh:

coproc {
  while true; do
    print $RANDOM

    sleep 1
  done
}

while read -p number; do
  print "Here's a random number: $number"
done

This is a retarded example, but it can be used for greater good; too bad you can only have a single coprocess and implicit channel.

By the way, goroutines are very nice, too bad the language is retarded on some very important parts (no exception handling).