I had one slot in which I wasn’t speaking at the No Fluff Just Stuff in Boston, so I snuck into Ted’s talk on COmega.
In typical Ted style, a tangent occured, and an hour later we had only gone through a few slides ;)
This isn’t a bad thing though, as we got to play with some interesting pieces of COmega. I had been looking mostly at the XML/SQL features, which are a step up from Groovy for example, as they are first class citizens (Groovy SQL / XML is a large step up from Java though!).
What I hadn’t spent much time looking at was the Polyphonic C# side of the house. It really was interesting to see the chord based concurrency constructs.
For example, here is how you can implement Reader/Writer Locks:
class ReaderWriter {
ReaderWriter() { idle(); }
public void Shared() & async idle() { s(1); }
public void Shared() & async s(int n) { s(n+1); }
public void ReleaseShared() & async s(int n) {
if (n == 1) idle(); else s(n-1);
}
public void Exclusive() & async idle() {}
public void ReleaseExclusive() { idle(); }
}
Very, very cool stuff. I hope much of it gets into C# 3.0, and hence Java 7.0 ;)
P.s. it is good to have Ted in town this week. Hopefully we can show him a good time in the Mad-town!
