Fwd: The Web, Continuations, and All That

[Tobias Gerdin]

2012/1/31 Ian Price <address@hidden>:
> [...]
>
> A whole bunch of ideas were discussed on IRC a while back[1], and
> serialisation was one of the issues I was most concerned about. As it
> stands, when the program stops you lose all your existing continuations,
> which may be undesirable.
>
> Another important issue was brought up by Antono, which is that
> continuation URLs effectively form a gc root, and you can't safely get
> rid of continuations without possibly breaking some url. And even though
> it you can just say "well, tough", you at least need some strategy for
> periodically pruning your set of continuations.

There are various solutions to this problem, such as associating a
time-to-live with each entry in the continuation table (like the
typical handling of session objects in traditional web programming),
or make use of a weak hashtable.

> I'd like to see you, or I, or someone, do something like this for guile,
> but I think the first step is to look at existing continuation based
> frameworks and see how they handle some of these issues.

Yes, could be fruitful to study other systems like the Racket web
server and Seaside. But I think that at this point it would just be
nice with something working and hackable, but maybe not a
super-scalable production framework.

-Tobias