[bitc-dev] bitc and coroutines

[Sam Mason]

On Sat, Dec 02, 2006 at 12:34:54PM -0500, Jonathan S. Shapiro wrote:
> Portions of the activation handler clearly need to be in assembler
> because they deal with register-level interactions.

Indeed they will.  The aim of pointing out coroutines was that it struck
me as a nice conceptual model that the user land scheduler could use
internally.  I've just realised that this message should really have
gone to the Coyotos list instead of this one!  Ah well, seemed like a
langauge thing at the time.

> The coroutines question is indeed interesting, and at the moment I don't
> have any answer for you except to say that we should add things to BitC
> very cautiously. 

I agree that BitC's core should be as small as possible.  It's going to
be difficult enough as it is!

> I'm not convinced that the language should provide
> support for threading or co-routines. Speaking from my perspective as a
> programmer, most language support for these features is badly flawed.

There never seems to be enough thought put into the design of these
things.  The Python implementation of coroutines is already in it's
second generation and I found things after a couple of days that it
doesn't allow, yet should really support.

Threading is (as I guess you know) a can of worms of such monstrous
proportions that it amazes me they are used so freely---I guess that's a
problem that's best solved by showing people how counter-intuitive they
can be rather than any other way though.


  Sam