[swift-evolution] [Concurrency] async/await + actors

[Chris Lattner]

Hi all,

As Ted mentioned in his email, it is great to finally kick off discussions for what concurrency should look like in Swift.  This will surely be an epic multi-year journey, but it is more important to find the right design than to get there fast.

I’ve been advocating for a specific model involving async/await and actors for many years now.  Handwaving only goes so far, so some folks asked me to write them down to make the discussion more helpful and concrete.  While I hope these ideas help push the discussion on concurrency forward, this isn’t in any way meant to cut off other directions: in fact I hope it helps give proponents of other designs a model to follow: a discussion giving extensive rationale, combined with the long term story arc to show that the features fit together.

Anyway, here is the document, I hope it is useful, and I’d love to hear comments and suggestions for improvement:
https://gist.github.com/lattner/31ed37682ef1576b16bca1432ea9f782

-Chris