Bartosz Milewski Missing post

[Robert Jacques]

On Thu, 28 May 2009 08:45:42 -0400, Jason House  
<jason.james.house at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm really surprised by the lack of design discussion in this thread.  
> It's amazing how there can be huge bursts of discussion on which keyword  
> to use (e.g. manifest constants), but then complete silence about major  
> design decisions like thread safety that defines new transitive states  
> and a bunch of new keywords. The description even made parallels to the  
> (previously?) unpopular const architecture.
>
> Maybe people are waiting for Walter to go through all the hard work of  
> implementing this stuff before complaining that it's crap and  
> proclaiming Walter should have done in the first place?
> This seems really unfair to Walter. Then again, I see no indication of  
> Walter wanting anything else.

Well, there's been a fair amount of previous related discussion. I've  
placed a proposal up on Wiki4D  
(http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?OwnershipTypesInD), though since  
it was assembled from a bunch of personal notes on the subject and uses  
Walter's old suggestion of using 'scope' instead of Bartosz's 'lent' it's  
a bit confusing. I'm planning on re-working it, but other deadlines come  
first. There's also been a lot of talk about message  
passing/future/promise/task/actor/agent based concurrency, data parallel  
models such as bulk synchronous programming (BSP) or GPU programming and  
auto-parallelization of pure functions. About the only thing needed from  
the type system to implement either of these models is the ability for  
uniques/mobiles to do a do-si-do type move (which should supported by ref  
unique). And BSP/GPU stuff are way too bleeding edge to support in the  
language proper yet.

Honestly, I think people are holding back in part because Bartosz has only  
started to reveal a threading scheme and so are waiting for him to  
complete it, before proverbially ripping it apart.