[plt-scheme] Futures!

From: Robby Findler (robby at eecs.northwestern.edu)
Date: Tue Apr 13 19:50:02 EDT 2010

On Tue, Apr 13, 2010 at 5:42 PM, Synx <plt at synx.us.to> wrote:
>
> On 04/12/2010 05:12 PM, Robby Findler wrote:
>> Display is not future safe. (You saw the section in the guide right?
>> That would have helped you understand your code.)
>
> I did see the section. It did help me understand my code. I was just
> being braindead when I posted that.
>
> I suppose in the future more aspects of PLT will be made future safe, so
> that it can do more transparent parallel processing, without having to
> go and import scheme/fixnum and use fx+ and stuff. For now it's still
> very impressive though.

FWIW, + is inlined if it actually gets fixnums, so you don't have to
use fx+. It is just that fx+ can help you stay in the fast path by
giving you an error when you leave it (and unsafe-fx+ is a little bit
faster).

In general, I think the path forward will probably depend on
applications. That is, if you have some program that you care about
(not a toy) that can benefit from parallelism but won't work because
some operations are missing, then I expect they'll get added.
Otherwise, probably not.

Robby


Posted on the users mailing list.