Re: ELisp futures and continuations/coroutines

[Stefan Monnier]

SM> That's a good idea.  Kind of like a future.
> Speaking of futures, can we have a general facility for those?
> 1) a real "future" type
> 2) a way to construct it and check if the value is available
> 3) process sentinel tie-in

Patches welcome (preferably Elisp-only for a start).

> I'm sure much of this facility is either possible or already available
> in ELisp, I just don't know the pieces and I think it would be very
> convenient to provide a "future" type.  WDYT?

I don't think it's already available, nor do I think similar things are
commonly used currently.

> Similarly it would be very nice to provide continuations and coroutines
> if those are not already possible.  They don't need a top-level type
> though, a lexical closure is sufficient I think.  Please tell me how I'm
> wrong :)

Given the way we implement the stack call/cc is difficult to implement.
But the concurrency branch should make it easy to have coroutines.


        Stefan