[plt-dev] Parallel Futures Release

I've updated the docs with a bit more about point 1. I'll leave the
others for James.

Robby

On Mon, Dec 7, 2009 at 11:48 AM, Jon Rafkind <rafkind at cs.utah.edu> wrote:
> On 12/07/2009 10:31 AM, James Swaine wrote:
>>
>> I'm pleased to announce the initial release of parallel futures, a
>> construct for fine-grained parallelism in PLT. Roughly speaking, a
>> programmer passes a thunk to 'future' and it gets run in parallel.
>> That "roughly" holds a few gotchas, partly because we're just getting
>> started and partly due to the technique we're using. See the
>> documentation for more details:
>>
>>  http://pre.plt-scheme.org/docs/html/futures/
>>
>>
>
> Cool, great job. A few things:
>
> 1. Can you give more guidelines as to which functions will cause the future
> to block? Will `cons' block? If not, will allocating memory that triggers a
> GC block the future until its `touch'ed?
>
> 2. I don't see how the (sleep) call at the end of section 2 changes the
> output. I assume the runtime number that the future is waiting at was
> supposed to change but I have no reference to compare with.
>
> 3. It sounds slightly unfortunate that once a future blocks it won't
> continue in parallel on its own after the blocking call has completed. Is
> this virtually impossible to implement?
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