concurrency

[Joel C. Salomon]

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downs wrote:
> Jason House wrote:
>> I've never heard of that.  Does anyone have a good link for extra detail on futures?
>>
> Basically, it comes down to a function that takes a delegate dg, and runs it on a threadpool, returning a wrapper object.
> The wrapper object can be evaluated, in which case it blocks until the original dg has returned a value. This value is then returned by the wrapper, as well as cached.
> The idea is that you create a future for a value that you know you'll need soon, then do some other task and query it later. :)

… while Sean Kelly wrote:
> Futures are basically Herb Sutter's rehashing of Hoare's CSP model.

More specifically, this sounds like a special case of a CSP-like channel
where only one datum is ever transmitted.  (Generally, channels are
comparable to UNIX pipes and can transmit many data.)

Russ Cox has a nice introduction to channel/thread programming at
<http://swtch.com/~rsc/talks/threads07> and an overview of the field at
<http://swtch.com/~rsc/thread>.

- --Joel
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