Have you all seen this "Promises" AS3 api? https://github.com/CodeCatalyst/promise-as3/tree/develop
I just discovered it, but it looks pretty darn nice. @Cosma, your initial "locking" code example reminds me of the new "await" keyword in C#: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh156528(v=vs.110).aspx This also reminds me of "Reactive Extensions", which was a library that attempted to address some of the issues with asynchronous spaghetti. It was originally a .NET project, but it's been ported to AS3. (AS3 Implementation: https://github.com/richardszalay/raix) It's been a while since I looked at it, but I recall that reactive programming was an interesting way of looking at asynchronous code. Although I remember it making some things easier to read, the learning curve was steep (to my mind anyway), and the end result didn't feel particularly readable. @Justin mentioned the problem of having 3 separate calls that need to return before the 4th call can be made, and that is one of the things that I recall Reactive Extensions could solve specifically. In fact, Reactive Extensions were specifically good at taking multiple asynchronous streams of results and combining them in different ways. I wrote a library to make it easier to write pseudo/cooperative "threads" in AS3: https://github.com/Taytay/CoThreadAS3 It's good at splitting it up a task so that it runs like a background thread that still reads linearly. (Granted, this will be obsolete once worker threads get here). After reading about all of these asynchronous concepts again though, it makes me want to revisit my library and express some of the API in terms of Promises. I think it would simplify things a great deal. Cheers, Taylor Brown On Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 1:11 PM, Cosma Colanicchia <cosma...@gmail.com>wrote: > @Martin > > > A DSL for lazy operations has proven itself quite valuable as you can se > > from the various tweening apis they may be a little wasteful but > > ultimately result in more stable, flexible systems that are easier to > read. > > In alternative to "real" synchronized methods, I agree that a powerful > DSL for lazy operations would be really useful... this could also be > more in line with the current async approach. > > > Cosma >
