Re: continuations

[Lennon Day-Reynolds <address@hidden>]

Reading this paper reminded me of a question I had after the first
mention on this list of using continuations and threads for dynamic
content servers: has any work been done to create a Scheme interface to
the select() or poll() calls used in a number of higher-speed C servers?
I may be showing my ignorance of the capabilities of userland thread
implementations here, but in the server architectures I've worked on,
(Java, C, and Python) creating a new thread for each request resulted in
a similar performance breakdown curve (though slightly shifted) to the
process-per-request model in extremely high load situations.

It seems like some variant of the asynchronous, event-driven calls
available in C, Python, and now even Java (in the newest JDK, anyway)
could fit beautifully with continuations for logic that spanned multiple
request/response cycles.

I'm sure there's an obvious reason why it hasn't been done previously,
or that I'm missing out on something fundamental, but thought it
couldn't hurt to check.


Lennon Day-Reynolds