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Commit 9297eeca authored by Vladimir Sedach's avatar Vladimir Sedach
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Added README file w/documentation.

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README 0 → 100644
Eager Future2 is a Common Lisp library that provides composable
concurrency primitives that unify parallel and lazy evaluation, are
integrated with CL's condition system, and have automatic resource
management.
The basic unit of concurrency in Eager Future2 is the future, which is
a data type that acts as a proxy for the values of a no-argument
function (thunk) that is computed concurrently.
Eager Future2 provides several strategies for computing futures
(specified as keywords): :lazy (only computed when the future is asked
to yield its values), :speculative (may be computed when there is
processing capacity available), and :eager (computation begins as
soons as the future is created).
A future is created by the pcall function, which takes a thunk to
compute, and optionally the computing strategy. The default computing
strategy is specified by *default-future-type*, which is :speculative
by default.
A future can be asked for its values with the yield function. The
function ready-to-yield? is a non-blocking way to check whether the
future is done computing. The function select takes a set of futures
and blocks until at least one future is ready to yield, returning that
future.
Ongoing computation of a future can be aborted with the force
function, which takes the future and desired yield values and attempts
to install them in that future. If a future has already finished
computing, calling force on it will have no effect.
Error handling is done transparently (the same way as if the program
wasn't written to use futures) by proxying unhandled conditions and
available restarts across thread boundaries. An additional restart
called force-values is also offered, which simply calls force on the
future whose computation raised the error.
If a future is no longer referenced and gets garbage collected, any
ongoing computation associated with that future is aborted to release
underlying thread resources. This permits speculative computation to
be done without having to worry about manual resource management.
API documentation:
function pcall (thunk &optional (future-type *default-future-type*)) => future
Given a function of no arguments, returns an object (called a
future) that can later be used to retrieve the values computed by the
function.
future-type (by default the value of *default-future-type*) can either
be :eager, :speculative, or :lazy. See the documentation of
*default-future-type* for an explanation of the different future
types.
The function is called in an unspecified dynamic environment.
function ready-to-yield? (future) => nil or non-nil
Returns non-nil if the future values have been computed, nil otherwise.
function yield (future) => value*
Returns the computed values of the future.
In case of a delayed future, computes the value of the future in the
current thread.
In case of a speculative future, if no other thread is computing the
value of the future, computes the value in the current thread. If
another thread is currently computing the value of the future, blocks
until the value is available.
In case of an eager future, blocks until the value is available.
function select (&rest futures) => future
Returns the first future that is ready to yield.
function force (future &rest values) => nil
If the future has not yet yielded a value, installs the given
values as the yield-values of the future (stopping any ongoing
computation of the future).
macro pexec (&body body) => future
A shorthand for (pcall (lambda () ...)).
macro plet ((&rest bindings) &body body)
Like LET, but all bindings are evaluated asynchronously.
function iterate-futures (proc futures) => nil
Calls proc on each future in select order. Proc is a procedure that
takes the currently yieldable future as its first argument, and the
list of futures not yet processed as its second. Futures need to be
yielded by proc - this is done so that proc can have control of error
handling. The second argument is useful to for example be able to
terminate remaining computations before a non-local control transfer.
function force-all (futures &rest values) => nil
Calls force on all given future with values. Useful to stop
remaining computations in for example iterate-futures.
macro pand (&rest exprs) => t or nil
Evaluates expressions in parallel. If any expression yields nil,
terminates all outstanding computations and returns nil. If all
expressions yield a non-nil value, returns t.
macro por (&rest exprs) => nil or non-nil
Evaluates expressions in parallel. Returns the value of the first
expression that yields a non-nil value. If all expressions evaluate
to nil, returns nil.
function select-timeout (timeout &rest futures) => future or nil
Given a timeout (in seconds) and a set of futures, returns either
nil if no futures are ready to yield when timeout seconds have
elapsed, or the first yieldable future otherwise.
macro pfuncall (function &rest args) => result
Evaluates args in parallel before funcalling the given function on them.
......@@ -18,7 +18,7 @@
(or (slot-boundp future 'values) (error-descriptor future)))
(defun ready-to-yield? (future)
"Returns t if the future values have been computed, nil otherwise."
"Returns non-nil if the future values have been computed, nil otherwise."
(with-lock-held ((lock future))
(%ready-to-yield? future)))
......@@ -64,7 +64,7 @@ computation of the future)."
(condition-wait notifier select-lock)))))
(defun yield (future)
"Returns the computed value of the future.
"Returns the computed values of the future.
In case of a delayed future, computes the value of the future in the
current thread.
......
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