[stdlib-sig] futures - a new package for asynchronous execution

[Brian Quinlan]

On Nov 8, 2009, at 6:37 AM, Jeffrey Yasskin wrote:
> --- More general points ---
>
> ** Java's Futures made a mistake in not supporting work stealing, and
> this has caused deadlocks at Google. Specifically, in a bounded-size
> thread or process pool, when a task in the pool can wait for work
> running in the same pool, you can fill up the pool with tasks that are
> waiting for tasks that haven't started running yet. To avoid this,
> Future.get() should be able to steal the task it's waiting on out of
> the pool's queue and run it immediately.

Hey Jeff,

I understand the deadlock possibilities of the executor model, could  
you explain your proposal would work?

Would it be some sort of flag on the Future.get method e.g.  
Future.get(timeout=None, immediate_execution=False)?

Cheers,
Brian