Concurrent programming coming to JavaScript

[Tom Locke <tom@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi All,

I find the following to be of extreme importance to us CSP lovers:

Brendan "JavaScript" Eich wants to include *useable* language-level  
support for concurrency into JavaScript 3

Key quotes:

	A requirement for JS3 (along with hygienic macros) is to do  
something along these more implicit lines of concurrency support. In  
all the fast yet maintainable MT systems I've built or worked on, the  
key idea (which Will Clinger stated clearly to me over lunch last  
fall) is to separate the mutable unshared data from the immutable  
shared data. Do that well, with language and VM support, and threads  
become what they should be: not an abstraction violator from hell,  
but a scaling device that can be composed with existing abstractions.

	So here's a promise about threads ... JS3 will be ready for the  
multicore desktop workload.

Link: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/2007/02/ 
threads_suck.html

There is a growing belief that Ecmascript / JavaScript is about to  
become The Next Big Language. Static typing is being added, as well  
as other "in the large" features. Performance is becoming competitive  
with Java. I think it's already the most widely known language...

Some of you heavy-hitters really need to start up a dialogue with Eich.

Of course the future is always murky, but there's a pretty real  
possibility that this is *the* opportunity to take the CSP ideas we  
love mainstream. An opportunity such that has never existed and may  
never again.

At *least* it might be possible to steer things such that the  
primitives can support fine-grained, high performance CSP via a library.

Peter - remember your CSP workshops at Sun where you convinced (IIRC)  
everyone except Gosling? Time for a re-run at the Mozilla foundation!  
These open-source types are much cuddlier than corporate lackeys  
y'know :-)

Time to act!

Tom