[Mono-devel-list] Re: Re: Dynamically changing classes?

[Piers Haken]

Aren't continuations just delegates invoked as a tail-call?

Piers.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Paolo Molaro [mailto:lupus at ximian.com] 
> Sent: Saturday, September 27, 2003 6:25 AM
> To: mono-devel-list at lists.ximian.com
> Subject: Re: [Mono-devel-list] Re: Re: Dynamically changing classes?
> 
> 
> On 09/26/03 Rodrigo B. de Oliveira wrote:
> > I can understand all the motivations behind a static and 
> simpler type 
> > system. But don't you think there are features best 
> implemented by the 
> > runtime? Coroutines and
> > continuations, for instance?
> 
> The runtime already supports coroutines out of the box. You 
> can try them out in C# code by using mcs with the -v2 option 
> (google for iterators and you'll find examples and more 
> information). Continuations are more tricky:-), but it's not 
> enough to ask: let's add continuations to the ECMA spec. A 
> lot of research is needed even before considering how to 
> support continuations in the CLR. You need to take scheme, 
> smalltalk, ruby and whatnot people in a room and have them 
> come up with a possible implementation strategy that works 
> for all of them. There are several ways to implement 
> continuations, each with their own tradeoffs. Some of those 
> langauges fovour call speed over continuation speed, for 
> example and it's hard to have a workable continuation 
> implementation that achieves both. Then, once the people 
> agree on a common solution, we can discuss how to implement 
> it in the CLR/mono. From my point of view, there is basically 
> one constraint: the features of a language should not screwup 
> other languages that don't use it. This means that 
> continuations, for example, won't work across code that is 
> not continuation-aware, because that would mean a slowdown of 
> common code, but I don't think this is a big limitation, 
> afterall, it's not something that was possible before anyway.
> 
> Executive summary: efficient continuations support may need 
> changes in the runtime: nobody presented a proposal for 
> discussion, though. We can help people implement a proposal 
> in the mono runtime and help design it in a way that fits the 
> CLR view of the world, but people interested in the feature 
> should do something more that say "we want continuations 
> support directly in the CLR". What new opcodes/prefixes would 
> be necessary? What custom attributes or icalls? What new 
> constructs? Are the needs of all/most of the languages that 
> use continuations covered? The CLR is open to innovation (see 
> generics) and more so is mono (fast free software runtime): 
> what is missing is a proposal for the changes that works as a 
> common runtime feature and is implementable.
> 
> lupus
> 
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