[plt-dev] Parallel Futures Release

On Mon, Dec 7, 2009 at 12:31 PM, James Swaine <james.swaine at gmail.com> 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:

A question about the semantics:

When a `future' blocks because it calls a non-threadsafe primitive,
why not put it in a new `thread', so that it continues to run
concurrently, rather than blocking?  That way if the main thread
blocks (waiting for input, or something like that), the computation
would continue.
-- 
sam th
samth at ccs.neu.edu