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Subject: Re: (j3.2006) (SC22WG5.5561) LCPC conference in Raleigh
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On Tue, 2015-09-15 at 13:37 +0000, Bill Long wrote:
> 
> I think Futures are part of X10 from IBM.  

"Futures" are also sometimes called promises.  They're data structures
where the result of a concurrent computation will eventually appear.
One can drag these around until the result is needed, and then look at
it.  If the result isn't yet available when somebody looks at it, he
gets suspended.  They're similar to what Arvind calls I-Store.  I-Store
has the additional feature that if you write into it when it has a
value, that's an error that raises an exception.  I don't know whether
futures and promises have that behavior.

Future iterators are also useful.  They spawn a list of tasks that have
future results, and then one can process the results in the order they
finish, which is not necessarily the order they started.