[gambit-list] serialization of promises
Marc Feeley
feeley at iro.umontreal.ca
Thu Jun 11 10:40:00 EDT 2009
On 11-Jun-09, at 12:23 AM, Darren Baker wrote:
> Marc -
>
> Gambit doesn't allow automatic serialization of promises (delay/force)
> using object->u8vector, is this by design or otherwise?
>
> It seems I could get around this by rolling my own force and delay,
> but
> perhaps there's a good reason not to be trying to serialize such
> things?
>
This is an oversight on my part. With the current implementation of
delay, there is no issue with serializing promises (apart from the
fact that they have state, but that's no different than serializing a
pair which also has state, i.e. force vs. set-car!/cdr!).
So I have implemented promise serialization/deserialization.
Unfortunately I can't push the patch to the repository because our
server has crashed (it should be back up in a few hours).
There are some general issues with serializing promises:
1) Gambit can be built to implement "autoforcing" on primitives, i.e.
(+ (delay 1) (delay 2)) => 3 . So the question is whether object-
>u8vector should autoforce or not.
2) Promises and "placeholders" (the result of a "future") are
conceptually very similar and in previous versions of Gambit these
were the same type. But placeholders need a thread queue to suspend
waiting threads, and these thread queues are not serializable.
> As an aside, I also noticed that there's a ##promise? predicate but no
> non-## version. Seemed a bit odd.
I'll add that too.
Marc
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