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Let futures be futures

without.boats · 7,421 words · saved by 1 readers

In the early-to-mid 2010s, there was a renaissance in languages exploring new ways of doing concurrency. In the midst of this renaissance, one abstraction for achieving concurrent operations that was developed was the “future” or “promise” abstraction, which represented a unit of work that will maybe eventually complete, allowing the programmer to use this to manipulate control flow in their program. Building on this, syntactic sugar called “async/await” was introduced to take futures and shape them into the ordinary, linear control flow that is most common. This approach has been adopted in many mainstream languages, a series of developments that has been controversial among practitioners.

Let futures be futures February 3, 2024 In the early-to-mid 2010s, there was a renaissance in languages exploring new ways of doing concurrency. In the midst of this renaissance, one abstraction for achieving concurrent operations that was developed was the "future" or "promise" abstraction, which represented a unit of work that will maybe eventually complete, allowing the programmer to use this to manipulate control flow in their program. Building on this, syntactic sugar called "async/await" was introduced to take futures and shape them into the ordinary, linear control flow that is most com

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