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Re: Continuations for the JVM proposal
- From: Per Bothner <per at bothner dot com>
- To: Jim White <jim at pagesmiths dot com>
- Cc: Kawa List <kawa at sources dot redhat dot com>
- Date: Sat, 24 Jul 2004 20:29:42 -0700
- Subject: Re: Continuations for the JVM proposal
- References: <410318F1.1000106@pagesmiths.com>
Jim White wrote:
Hi Gang.
Just encountered this:
http://vafer.org/blog/tcurdt/archives/000109.html
Some folks who want to get a JSR going to add continuations to the JVM.
Don't know whether it will get anywhere but figured Per is exactly the
sort of person they want to participate.
I'm not convinced it should be supported at the JVM level.
For Scheme it seems like (efficient) tail-calls would be
a higher priority. (If you have tail-calls, you can
implement continuations by a relatively simple source-to-source
translation.)
Coincidentally, right now I'm working on continuations for Kawa.
I'm not promising full continuations soon - but it might happen,
as part of a tail-call rewrite I'm working on.
Certainly, continuations are appealing for web-pages, and are
useful at the source code and design levels. But they don't
need to be implemented by the JVM, though of course that improves
performance.
Maybe Kawa can show how continuations can be compiled to the
existing JVM with tolerable performance.
--
--Per Bothner
per@bothner.com http://per.bothner.com/