[Python-Dev] [PEP 3148] futures - execute computations asynchronously (original) (raw)

Jeffrey Yasskin jyasskin at gmail.com
Sun Mar 7 17:39:55 CET 2010

On Sun, Mar 7, 2010 at 7:48 AM, P.J. Eby <pje at telecommunity.com> wrote:

At 02:49 PM 3/7/2010 +1000, Nick Coghlan wrote:

P.J. Eby wrote: > (Personally, I think it would be better to just drop the ambitious title > and scope, and go for the "nice task queue" scope.  I imagine, too, that > in that case Jean-Paul wouldn't need to worry about it being raised as a > future objection to Deferreds or some such getting into the stdlib.) This may be a terminology thing - to me futures are just a nice way to handle farming tasks out to worker threads or processes. You seem to see them as something more comprehensive than that. Actual futures are, yes.  Specifically, futures are a mechanism for asynchronous computation, whereas the PEP seems to be all about synchronously managing parallel tasks.  That's a huge difference. Technically, the things in the PEP (and by extension, Java's futures) match the letter of the definition of a future, but not (IMO) the spirit.  There's no clean way to compose them, and at base they're more about parallelism than asynchrony.

Do you have an example of a language or library that uses the term "future" to refer to what you're talking about? I'm curious to see what it looks like.

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