Re: Announcing 8sync: an asynchronous programming language for Guile

[Amirouche Boubekki]

Le 2015-12-05 15:58, Christopher Allan Webber a écrit :
> Amirouche Boubekki writes:
> > * Agenda
> >
> > ** The canonical callback based event loop API is not visible enough
> >
> > It should be obvious coming from outside Guile world what/where
> > is the event loop. As such, agenda doesn't seem like a good name.
>
> "Agenda" is not a unique name for this.  That's what SICP uses, that's
> what Sly uses.

Ok with agenda, maybe that's a native idiom I don't get.

Still I think that the canonical event loop API should be implemented
in an obvious way. If otherwise, it should be clear why it's not done 
that
way. In my implementation I don't rely on intermediate data-structures
and it's obvious imho:

- how to run procedure in the loop asap
- how to register a callback to run when a port is ready
- how to pause a procedure until a port is ready

And afaik, it doesn't forbid functional programming. The only mutations
that happen, happen inside the loop primitives to register and run 
select
callbacks.

> > ** Agenda has both `schedule` and `queue`
> >
> > For a proof of concept, queue/schedule is not useful to demonstrate
> > the purpose of eightsync as it's an optimization.
>
> It's no mere optimization.  "schedule" is future events that haven't
> been queued; it's only for time-delayed events.  The queue is for 
> things
> that must be done immediately.

Sure it is an optimisation. Only `schedule` is needed to implemented
both "call later" and "call asap" which is "call later" with a delay of 
0.