The nicest part, by far, of OSCON is the folks that you get to talk to when you're otherwise ignoring the conference. At lunch Friday (which I owe Ingy for. D'oh!) I spent a good chunk of time talking with Autrijus about serializable continuations.
Autrijus needs 'em for doing linear web programming, and has, scarily enough, got them mostly working in Perl 5. (Which should, in and of itself, be sufficient to add him to the list of Scary-smart People of perl) He'd like more, and definitely wants them for parrot. We talked for a while about what he needs, what he wants, and how things work.
Y'know what?
We can do them. More to the point, we will do them. What's even more cool is that I know how to do it without having to serialize the bytecode. (Though there are cases where bytecode serialization is absolutely required. Basically if you're using bytecode that was entirely on-disk you don't need to)
This... should be fun. :)
Posted by Dan at August 2, 2004 03:27 PM | TrackBack (0)You rock too, Dan.
Posted by: Andrew Sweger at August 2, 2004 09:22 PMjust to ask: I recently read the article from Chris Double about call/pc (partial continuations).
IIUC those are a wonderful way to do continuation based frameworks a-la seaside/borges, cause they are more cheap to store then normal conts.. some hope to see them on parrot?
I think we could probably do partial continuations, yeah. First we get full continuation serialization working, though. (And I'm not 100% sure you can safely serialize a partial continuation, but then again I'm not sure you couldn't, either)
Posted by: Dan at August 5, 2004 01:33 PM