Re: Concurrent programming coming to JavaScript

[Allan McInnes <amcinnes@xxxxxxxxxx>]

It's probably worth noting that Will Clinger (mentioned in the extract of
Brendan's blog) did a bunch of work on the Actor model of concurrency. So it's
possible that's the direction that Javascript will end up going for
concurrency. The Actor model shares a lot of ideas with CSP, but also has a few
key differences, e.g. asynchronous rather than rendezvous communications, and
message delivery based on the identity of the receiver rather than via channels
(Erlang, for those familiar with it, uses a message-passing approach along the
lines of the Actor model).

Of course, it's pretty straightforward to build a CSP-like channel-based
rendezvous messaging system on top of an Actor-style system, so Tom's idea of a
CSP library should be feasible even if Javascript does take the Actor route
instead of the CSP one. Either approach would be a vast improvement over
threads with shared state.

Allan



Quoting 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
>
>


-- 
Allan McInnes <amcinnes@xxxxxxxxxx>
PhD Candidate
Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Utah State University