As I understand it, this type of thing was kept out of the language proper intentionally, because of its strong dependency on host environment. Some host environments may require tight and overriding control of any event handling system, and exactly which types of events (such as timeouts) are suitable to an environment may vary. A server side host might not want to have to deal with asynchronous activity at all, for instance.
Speaking as someone who has written and currently maintains a *synchronous* server-side JavaScript environment (based on V8), I attest to the statement that I would *not* like it if V8 had `setTimeout()` (...etc) in it, because unless V8 were going to take care of that completely black-box for me, then I'd have to either disable such interfaces, or figure out some more complicated functionality in my environment to handle the "concurrency".
I prefer they stay out of the engine, unless the engine is going to completely take care of it. The most important part of the engine "taking care of it" would be blocking the end of the program to wait for any outstanding event loop "turns" that had not yet fired, etc. Seems like that could get really messy.
--Kyle _______________________________________________ es-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss
