I have spent some time looking at the new stuff in Concurrent.pmod that Grubba has added to 8.1. Mostly it is code relating to the concept of Promises and Futures which are very popular amongst JavaScript people these days.
I have noted that there seems to be some rather striking differences between how JavaScript treats promises and how Pike does it. I'm not sure this is a good thing(tm) and therefore I'd like to bring this up before 8.1 stabilizes. In Pike, we have two methods that register callback functions, Future.on_success() and Future.on_failure() as opposed to JS where only one method, then(), is used to register both callbacks. I don't mind having two different methods, but for easier transition between the two languages (i.e. for people writing both client-side and server-side code) having the same API would probably help. A bigger problem imho is the difference in how promises are actually resolved. In JavaScript, the return value of then() is always a *new* promise which then allows for chaining. In Pike, we return the same promise object. This means that code like my_promise->on_success(foo)->on_success(bar) in Pike would result only in a call to bar() once my_promise is resolved whereas in JavaScript, foo() would be called and it's return value would be the input to bar in a new promise. The whole creation of promises is also somewhat awkward in Pike. In JS, you simply pass a callback that will do all the work and that will recieve a success callback and a failure callback as arguments and off you go. In Pike, I'm not sure what the best way to do it is. I really like the idea of having promises in Pike, but would it not be much better if we tried to implement an API more similar to what the JS folks are used to? At least I think so... Here are three links to good resources I've found regarding promises in JS. I'm sure there are a ton of others as well. https://promisesaplus.com/ http://www.mattgreer.org/articles/promises-in-wicked-detail/ http://bluebirdjs.com/docs/api-reference.html
