Continuation Passing Style (CPS) and compile-time evaluation (and parallelism/concurrency) about basil HOT 4 CLOSED

I've considered continuations before for Basil, primarily in the context of compile-time evaluation. I'm not sure I fully support arbitrary continuations at runtime - they're a bit tricky (can be hard to follow as a reader, and costly/complex to implement in native code esp. with concurrency). But I think it could be potentially interesting to support first-class continuations and environments somewhere down the line - it might be kind of difficult with the tree-walk style Basil's compile-time interpreter uses, but really the world is our oyster as far as compile-time features go.

Not super urgently worried about this though. I think we're content with a simple selection of structured control-flow features for the time being. I'm not concerned with safety to the point of worrying about statically-determining stack size, and at the moment I'm leaning a little more towards a message-passing model of concurrency.

Still super interesting to think about!

from basil.

and at the moment I'm leaning a little more towards a message-passing model of concurrency.

It's off-topic here, but I just want to say, that a highly constrained message-passing system can be made surprisingly efficient. The best I know is Weave which some would say is not really message passing but hey, they call it like that, so who cares. It's unbeliavably efficient per core and scales linearly in number of computational cores. It's all built around the extensive macro features of Nim.

Feel free to write about your thoughts regarding concurrency in Basil (probably in a separate issue) - I'll be more than happy to discuss it 😉 (disclaimer: I'm quite into it).

from basil.

The other thing as it stands is that concurrency is a relatively low-priority feature for Basil. It complicates a tremendous number of things (notably, GC) and isn't critically necessary for Basil to function in certain environments. So it'll probably be some time before it is really considered for implementation, unfortunately.

from basil.

Take your time. Actually it sounds like you have some specific use cases for Basil in mind. Would you mind to write about it in more depth some time somewhere?

from basil.