Growing fibers

https://wingolog.org/archives/2017/06/27/growing-fibers

by ingve • 9 years ago

114 16 9 years ago

tyoverby3• 9 years ago

I've been playing around with delimited continuations in a toy programming language of mine for a while now and I seriously think that its a paradigm that will eventually take over the scripting language space. First-class control flow is so powerful once you get the hang of it!

xfer4• 9 years ago

they already exist even though in a limited form: async/await, coroutines, generators etc. I doubt whether first-class support is that important.

fao_• 9 years ago

"First class functions exist in a limited form: Function pointers, etc. I doubt whether first-class support is that important".

aidenn0• 9 years ago

As hinted at in this paper, continuations are directly at odds with dynamic unwinding (e.g. "finally" blocks).

catern• 9 years ago

This is an excellent article not just because it explains this new concurrency library for Guile, but also because it demonstrates the fundamental concepts which underlie all concurrency. Processes in a Unix kernel, for example, deeply and directly parallel this implementation of fibers on a Guile VM.

bykovich2• 9 years ago

Thought this was going to be about growing physical fibers -- making cellulose threads in a reactor or something.

mattgreenrocks2• 9 years ago

Anyone have any recommendations on resources guiding implementation of delimited continuations?

xfer4• 9 years ago

http://okmij.org/ftp/continuations/implementations.html. The first paper on delimCC is a good start.

mattgreenrocks2• 9 years ago

Thanks!

zeckalpha• 9 years ago

Is there an equivalent library for Racket?

samth• 9 years ago

Delimited continuations are in the Racket standard library. Racket's thread system isn't built directly on them but is also lightweight. The in-progress work to run Racket in Chez Scheme uses an implementation more like what wingo describes, based on what's called "engines".

Growing fibers

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