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

[Brent Royal-Gordon]

> On Aug 25, 2017, at 10:12 PM, Howard Lovatt via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
> 
> I think we would be better off with a future type rather than async/await since they can offer timeout, cancel, and control over which thread execution occurs on.


async/await is a primitive you can build these high-level features on top of.

If you have async/await, you can temporarily handle timeout, cancel, and thread control manually until we have time to design features to address those. You can also ignore our features if you don't like them and use your own designs instead. Or you can substitute features more appropriate to your platform—imagine if Swift were a Linux language and you were writing the Mac port, and pthreads were so deeply baked into futures that our entire concurrency system couldn't be used with GCD.

You cannot design the entire world at once, or you'll end up with a huge, complicated, inflexible mess.

-- 
Brent Royal-Gordon
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