I have a program that spends most of the time waiting for user input/time to advance (think of a World.) I have a computation that I can perform at Frame 0, but I don't need the result until Frame 10. I will do some work between these frames.
I'd like to be able to have this computation take place in the background in parallel. I'd create it in frame 0, but delay forcing it until frame 10. Now, if I used a future, then, if the future does something unsafe, let's say half way through its execution, then half of the work would be blocked until frame 10. So, 50% of the task would be in parallel. If I used a thread, then nothing would run in parallel, but it would run in the background---i.e. utilize the time in between my frames. But this would actually compete with the work for frames 1 through 9, so they'd run slower. I'd like the best of both worlds. I would imagine that this would work by having blocked futures be a schedule-able thread so that if they need to do unsafe work---and no other Racket thread is available---then they could be selected for a quanta before being put back in the truly parallel world. Do futures already work like this? The documentation seems to suggest not. If not, is this possible? Jay -- Jay McCarthy <j...@cs.byu.edu> Assistant Professor / Brigham Young University http://faculty.cs.byu.edu/~jay "The glory of God is Intelligence" - D&C 93 _________________________________________________ For list-related administrative tasks: http://lists.racket-lang.org/listinfo/users
