I think this general sort of functionality has long been needed in Stackless, and it brings up the old sawhorse of why are we not including stacklesslib in Stackless distribution. But let's ignore that for now.
I like the idea of having a standard well received API from another popular language, that people can just pick up and use with approximately same namespace - even if the coding standards for this specific API conflict with the rest of the package. That said I don't get the API. It seems badly designed. To me, not having looked at the C# API much, I expect waitAll and waitAny should return the result of the tasks that completed with the index of each in the list. [ (0, text), ] = x.waitAny([ t1, t2 ]) And whenAll and whenAny should imply there's a result, but not pull it. [ 0 ] = async.whenAny([ t1, t2 ]) Then again, why return indexes. That just means you have to waste time holding onto the original list, if you do not have a permanent one. But I think that this should not just handle tasklet completion, it should also handle tasklets producing results via channels. In that case, it is useful to poll whether any tasklets have results, rather than waitX with a minimum timeout. I think that this should be in, but there surely can be a more natural fit. And this might mean a requirement for lower level support. And having written all this, the elephant in the room is that I believe CSP, which Andrew Francis has long been advocating, is closer to what I think we need. However, I've long had problems with using it ad hoc, as I think it is not that user friendly and is more theoretically balanced than functionally balanced. Cheers, Richard. _______________________________________________ Stackless mailing list [email protected] http://www.stackless.com/mailman/listinfo/stackless
