Stackless resumable functions

[via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 24 October 2014 at 14:50:53 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad 
wrote:
> On Friday, 24 October 2014 at 10:33:40 UTC, Martin Nowak wrote:
>> What I like most about the proposal is that you can adapt 
>> await by specializing template functions, similar to how range 
>> based foreach works.
>> It also isn't tied to a particular scheduling mechanism and of 
>> course consumes much less memory than stack based suspension.
>
> This is how all truly object oriented languages with 
> concurrency works. Block activation records are conceptually on 
> the heap and there is no difference between an object and a 
> function: Simula67, Beta, Self…
>
> It is slower than using a stack though, but if done as in Beta 
> you get a back pointer to the caller (who instantiate the 
> function/object) which can be handy for modelling.

It is worth pointing out that one advantage of taking this 
uniform view is that you can more easily define a system to 
persist/migrate a transitive closure of objects/fibers and 
transfer them to other servers.

However, it does not have to be stackless in terms of 
implementation. A stack is then an optimization, the compiled 
code can put things on the stack until it at runtime hits a yield 
(at which point you have to pick it up).