[Ocamlnet-devel] Event-based dispatch

[Patrick M D. <pa...@wa...>]

I have given some more thought to event-based dispatch and feel that it
is too important to ignore. Support for threading on Windows is not fully
supported and event-based programs can be easier to reason about. I
believe that Gerd was previously in favor of an event-based interface. Any
other opinions?

Here are some other thoughts related to event-based dispatch:

Currently, the pop interface has a general form like this for
transactions:

  val xact : 'request -> 'response

The event-based model would look like this:

  val xact' : 'request -> ('response -> unit) -> unit

where the transaction returns immediately. So a block of code written in
this style:

  let rsp1 = xact "req1" in
  let rsp2 = xact "req2" in
  ...

becomes

  xact' "req1" (fun rsp1 ->
    xact' "req2" (fun rsp2 ->
      ...
    );
  );

I notice that the type for xact' is very similar to the monadic bind
operator. Maybe it would be useful to write a camlp4 extension similar
to the syntactic sugar in Haskell for monads?

Patrick