Parallel promises, known to Racketeers as futures, are analogous to ordinary Scheme promises, except that implementations are allowed to execute part or all of such a promise in parallel with regular execution. An ordinary promise is not evaluated (and does not perform any side effects) until it is forced, whereas parallel promises may be evaluated either completely or up to an implementation-determined point when they are created. If any evaluation is left to do when a parallel promise is forced, it is done at that time.
A parallel promise, unlike a thread, is intended to provide parallelism for potentially limited computations. It performs its work in parallel (assuming that support for parallelism is available) until it detects an attempt to perform an operation that is too complex for the system to run safely in parallel. The list of such operations is necessarily implementation-dependent. Similarly, work on a parallel promise is suspended if it depends in some way on the current continuation, such as raising an exception.
Parallel promises are not intended to be used for concurrency, so there are no facilities for mutual exclusion. A computation in a parallel promise might use set! to modify a shared variable, in which case concurrent assignment to the variable can be visible in other parallel promises or threads. Furthermore, guarantees about the visibility of effects and ordering are determined by the operating system and hardware — which rarely support, for example, any guarantee of sequential consistency. At the same time, operations that seem obviously safe may have a complex enough implementation internally that they cannot run in parallel on a particular implementation.
1) Use "future" instead of "parallel promise" along with the Racket names?
2-3) Resolved.
(parallel-delay <expression>) [syntax]
Semantics: The parallel-delay construct is used together with the procedure parallel-force to implement potentially parallel evaluation (parallel-delay <expression>) returns an object called a parallel promise which at some point in the future can be asked (by the parallel-force procedure) to complete the evaluation of <expression>, and deliver the resulting value. The effect of <expression> returning multiple values is unspecified. (Racket future is a procedure taking a thunk)
(parallel-delay-force <expression>) [syntax]
Semantics: The expression (parallel-delay-force <expression>) is conceptually similar to (parallel-delay (parallel-force <expression>)), with the difference that forcing the result of parallel-delay-force will in effect result in a tail call to (parallel-force <expression>), while forcing the result of (parallel-delay (parallel-force <expression>)) might not. Thus iterative lazy algorithms that might result in a long series of chains of delay and force can be rewritten using delay-force to prevent consuming unbounded space during evaluation.
(parallel-force parpromise)
The parallel-force procedure forces the value of a parallel promise created by parallel-delay, parallel-delay-force, or make-parallel-promise. If no value has been computed for the promise, then a value is computed and returned. The value of the promise must be cached (or memoized) so that if it is forced a second time, the previously computed value is returned. Consequently, a delayed expression is evaluated using the parameter values and exception handler of the call to parallel-force which first requested its value. If parpromise is not a parallel promise, it may be returned unchanged. (Racket touch)
Various extensions to the semantics of parallel-delay, parallel-force and parallel-delay-force may be supported:
(parallel-promise? obj)
Returns #t if its argument is a parallel promise, and #f otherwise. Note that parallel promises are not necessarily disjoint from other Scheme types such as procedures.
(make-parallel-promise obj)
Returns a parallel promise which, when forced, will return obj . It is similar to parallel-delay, but does not delay its argument: it is a procedure rather than syntax. If obj is already a parallel promise, it is returned.
(current-parallel-promise)
Returns the parallel promise whose execution is the current continuation. If a parallel promise itself uses parallel-force, parallel-promise executions can be nested, in which case the descriptor of the most immediately executing parallel promise is returned. If the current continuation is not a parallel promise execution, the result is #f.
(parallel-call <func> <arg> ...) [syntax]
Semantics: Wrap <func> and each <arg> in a parallel promise. Force the parallel promises in an unspecified order. Then apply the value of the <func> promise to the value of the <arg> promises and return the result.
Parallel implementation of this proposal is necessarily very system-dependent. However, it is correct to implement parallel-delay, parallel-delay-force, parallel-force, parallel-promise?, make-parallel-promise, current-parallel-promise, and parallel-call as delay, delay-force, force, promise?, make-promise, (lambda () #f), and (syntax-rules parallel-call (syntax-rules () ((parallel-call func . args) (func . args)))) respectively.