Re: [9fans] "Blocks" in C

[Roman V Shaposhnik <rvs@sun.com>]

On Thu, 2009-09-03 at 08:44 -0700, David Leimbach wrote:

> The blocks aren't interesting at all by themselves, I totally agree
> with that.  However what they do to let you write a function inline,
> that can be pushed to another function, to be executed on a concurrent
> FIFO, is where the real power comes out.
>
>
> I'm not 100% sure why the heck they did it this way, which is totally
> different from any other version of concurrent programming setup I've
> seen, except maybe that Apple likes to "think different"?

It seems that quite a few concurrency frameworks worth the paper their
APIs are written on, are converging on this model. The ultimate goal
has to do with encapsulation of the computation into idempotent units
and describing the topology between those units. That separates the
executor from the semantics of computations nicely and has all sorts of
bonuses as far as bridging the gap between SMP and distributes systems
are concerned.

I think the semantics of what needs to be done is well understood. The
million dollar question is how to best express such a semantics in what
still looks like a programming language.

What Apple has done is one way of attacking the problem. Where I sit we
explore CPS for doing very similar sort of thing. One point is clear --
there no consensus yet.

Thanks,
Roman.