"future" for async calling?

[Robert Jacques]

On Sat, 13 Mar 2010 17:31:03 -0500, Nick Sabalausky <a at a.a> wrote:
> I just came across this interesting article about a generic type  
> "future",
> and was wondering is something like it was planned for Phobos (or Tango  
> for
> that matter), or was already in (I haven't been paying a lot of  
> attention to
> D concurrency), or just any thoughts about it in relation to D:
>
> Beginning of obnoxiously multi-paged article:
> http://www.drdobbs.com/go-parallel/article/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=222301165&pgno=1
>
> Direct link to the page with the real meat:
> http://www.drdobbs.com/go-parallel/article/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=222301165&pgno=3
>
>

Futures aren't planned for Phobos yet, because 1) they're hard to do  
safely and 2) message passing comes first. That said, there is already  
several libraries on dsource that have futures. I'd recommend dsimcha's  
parallelFuture library (http://cis.jhu.edu/~dsimcha/parallelFuture.html,  
http://dsource.org/projects/scrapple/browser/trunk/parallelFuture/parallelFuture.d).  
BTW the term 'future' has unfortunately been saddled with some poor  
implementations in the past and; this style of programming is often  
referred to as task programming.