The Philosophy of Coroutines: A Programmer's Musings

This article delves into the philosophy of coroutines through the lens of the author's personal journey. From early days simulating coroutines in C with preprocessor tricks to the advent of native C++20 coroutines, the author shares insights into their use and advantages. A comparison of coroutines versus state machines and threads highlights their flexibility, debuggability, and ease of cleanup, particularly beneficial for sequential tasks like network protocols and data stream processing. The author explores various coroutine implementations, optimization techniques using queues and pre-filters, and offers a glimpse into the future of coroutines.