Whats the difference between a spawn() loop and a coroutine loop

[teamassists]

id like to know what the difference is between doing a while loop inside of a spawn() and a while loop inside of a coroutine

because i recently changed my scripts to have while loops inside of coroutines instead of spawn() and i wanted to know what the differences was (if any), like if one of them was faster than the other or something

[Midnightific]

Psssst, it’s task.spawn now, not spawn.

I’ll give as much info as I can on this topic so get ready!

Execution Context

task.spawn is part of the task library (obviously) and it’s used to execute functions asynchronously. It creates a new thread of execution and instantly runs the function.

coroutine on the other hand, gives you options to halt the execution of the thread and resume it later within a single thread.

Concurrency

task.spawn allows you to run multiple functions simultaneously in parallel. Each task runs independently of the others and the task scheduler decides how to allocate resources to execute all functions efficiently.

coroutine cannot run multiple functions simultaneously. They are cooperative, they rely on explicit yielding and resumption to switch between different coroutines. Only one coroutine may execute at a given time.

task.spawn is generally more versatile and more widely used than coroutine but that doesn’t mean that coroutine isn’t great! It just depends on your use case.

tl;dr

task.spawn allows you to run multiple functions at once and is more versatile than coroutine

coroutine while not allowing you to run multiple functions at the same time allows for more control over execution flow within a single thread.

Let me know if you’ve got any other questions!

[teamassists]

wow, it suprised me that only 1 coroutine can run at once because i thought coroutines were similar to spawn()

[AxisAngle (AxisAngles)]

I think

task.spawn = function(ForC, ...)
    local thread
    if type(ForC) == "function" then
        thread = coroutine.create(ForC)
    else
        thread = ForC
    end

    coroutine.resume(thread, ...)
    return thread
end

The downside is that if the function in ForC uses coroutine.yield(outputs...), you can’t get the outputs out of it, unlike if you use
local outputs... = coroutine.resume(inputs...)