A Little Love for Io

Paul R. Brown @ 2008-01-09T05:23:49Z

Io has been getting some nice buzz lately for its reflection capabilities and minimality. Steve Dekorte's blog is also a good read, although software wisdom is vastly outnumbered by links to cool architecture and design.

My favorite thing about the language is still its concurrency annotations. Way back in 2004, when I was surveying Actor languages, I posted about Io's support for making methods non-blocking via annotating the invocation. (This is similar to Haskell's par annotation.) Other than activeCoroCount being replaced by activeActorCount, it looks like the annotations remain the same:

  • foo bar calls the bar method on the object foo synchronously, returning a value.
  • foo @bar calls the method asynchronously, immediately returning a future.
  • foo @@bar calls the method asynchronously, immediately returning nil

I haven't had a chance to try out the deadlock detection, but coming up with an example should be an interesting exercise.

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