Promise (programming): Difference between revisions

Revision as of 01:58, 13 July 2005

Revision as of 20:59, 21 July 2005

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In [[computer science]], a '''promise''' (also known as a '''future''' in some languages) is a proxy for a result that is not yet known, usually because the computation of its value has not yet completed. They were introduced in [[1977]] in the paper by [[Henry Baker (computer scientist)|Henry Baker]] and [[Carl Hewitt]]. The use of promises (futuuresfutures) can dramatically reduce latency in [[distributed computing|distributed systems]]. ''E.g.'', it enables pipelining of messages, called '''promise pipelining''' [http://www.erights.org/elib/distrib/pipeline.html] [http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PromisePipelining].

== Implementations ==