Futures And Promises
In computer science, future, promise, and delay refer to constructs used for synchronizing in some concurrent programming languages. They describe an object that acts as a proxy for a result that is initially unknown, usually because the computation of its value is yet incomplete.
The term promise was proposed in 1976 by Daniel P. Friedman and David Wise, and Peter Hibbard called it eventual. A somewhat similar concept future was introduced in 1977 in a paper by Henry Baker and Carl Hewitt.
The terms future, promise, and delay are often used interchangeably, although some differences in usage between future and promise are treated below. Setting the value of a future is also called resolving, fulfilling, or binding it.
Read more about Futures And Promises: Implicit Vs Explicit, Promise Pipelining, Read-only Views, Thread-specific Futures, Blocking Vs Non-blocking Semantics, Related Constructs, Relations Between The Expressiveness of Different Forms of Future, Relation To Lazy Evaluation, Semantics of Futures in The Actor Model, History, List of Implementations
Famous quotes containing the words futures and/or promises:
“One of the things that is most striking about the young generation is that they never talk about their own futures, there are no futures for this generation, not any of them and so naturally they never think of them. It is very striking, they do not live in the present they just live, as well as they can, and they do not plan. It is extraordinary that whole populations have no projects for a future, none at all.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“Health foods make promises that only the Second Coming could fulfill.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)