Consolidate IVar childen into one object

[pitr-ch]

IVar, Future, Promise, Probe have a lot in common. I think we could explore an way how to merge some or more into one class.

[chrisseaton]

Future and Promise possibly. Although the problem then is that people come to the library looking for promises and they only find futures, or the other way around. That goes against our policy of giving you the primitives you want without an opinion on which is best.

IVar and Future, I'm not so sure. IVar is a dataflow variable. Future is a computation that is also an IVar. One is data, the other is code. It seems like a very good thing to separate.

I don't know about Probe - never seen that one!

[dsisnero]

Right now Future and Promise are pretty much the same. Is there anything,
perhaps named differently, that you can use to complete a future like
scala's Promise. I think Future and Promise should be combined into
something but we need something else that works like Scala's promise.
http://danielwestheide.com/blog/2013/01/16/the-neophytes-guide-to-scala-part-9-promises-and-futures-in-practice.html
& http://docs.scala-lang.org/overviews/core/futures.html

On Wed, Jul 30, 2014 at 6:48 AM, Chris Seaton notifications@github.com
wrote:

Future and Promise possibly. Although the problem then is that people come
to the library looking for promises and they only find futures, or the
other way around. That goes against our policy of giving you the primitives
you want without an opinion on which is best.

IVar and Future, I'm not so sure. IVar is a dataflow variable. Future is a
computation that is also an IVar. One is data, the other is code. It seems
like a very good thing to separate.

I don't know about Probe - never seen that one!

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#139 (comment)
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[jdantonio]

Promise was one of the first things I wrote. It was based heavily on JavaScript's Promise/A and Promise/A+ specifications. As this library has evolved it has definitely strayed from the original influence and taken on a life of its own--a life that looks increasingly like our Future. I can get behind the idea of finding another inspiration (such as Scala's promise, as @dsisnero suggested) and evolving our Promise in that direction.

[mighe]

A Probe is a small component used by channels to implement the #select method. It is not meant to be part of the public API, but - of course - it can be refactored if necessary

[jdantonio]

I've started a new issue to discuss the next release and have suggested a new Promise implementation in that thread.

[pitr-ch]

Hi, sorry for me being late in the discussion after starting it. I quickly created the issue in a hurry without sharing my thoughts right-away, sorry.

Probe - adds single method set_unless_assigned which completes the IVar only when not completed returning true/false if success/failure. My thought was to add that to IVar and remove Probe.

But mainly I was thinking about what @dsisnero already said, to separate future and promise in Scala terms allowing to have only single object representing future value (no matter the source) keeping the computation separate as @chrisseaton said.

I should have time soonish to look into it.

[pitr-ch]

Hi, so I finally had few evenings and I've put together a draft how it could look like. Please review and comment in #176, let me know what do you think about the new API.