Promises: linguistic support for efficient asynchronous procedure calls in distributed systems

  • Authors:
  • B. Liskov;L. Shrira

  • Affiliations:
  • MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, Cambridge, MA;MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, Cambridge, MA

  • Venue:
  • PLDI '88 Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 1988 conference on Programming Language design and Implementation
  • Year:
  • 1988

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.02

Visualization

Abstract

This paper deals with the integration of an efficient asynchronous remote procedure call mechanism into a programming language. It describes a new data type called a promise that was designed to support asynchronous calls. Promises allow a caller to run in parallel with a call and to pick up the results of the call, including any exceptions it raises, in a convenient and type-safe manner. The paper also discusses efficient composition of sequences of asynchronous calls to different locations in a network.