"Simon Peyton-Jones" <simonpj@microsoft.com> wrote,
The bound-threads story interacts with the FFI -- indeed, it's in a document in Haskell-report/ffi/threads.tex. Do we ultimately plan to fold it into the FFI spec (but, awkwardly, it must speak of concurrency)? Or do we ultimately plan to have a separate "blessed appendix" on concurrency generally? And if the latter, who would like to edit it? Manuel has done a great job with the FFI spec; I doubt concurrency will be half as hard.
My vote is for leaving concurrency to a further addendum. This is not only because I am worried that including concurrency would delay the wrapping up of the FFI spec considerably, but because we so far have seperated FFI and concurrency (eg, in the finalizers story). Moreover, I think concurrency is very important in its own right and there should be a comprehensive standard covering its various aspects. Finally, while I doubt that we will ever have a system that implements concurrency, but lacks the FFI, it is reasonable to assume systems that support the FFI only. Cheers, Manuel