What is send/suspend?

posted by Jay McCarthy

I often ponder what send/suspend really is. It is a lot like call/cc, but has the curious property that the continuation escapes in a single way and is only called in a particular context. I often wonder if there is something weaker than call/cc that implements send/suspend.

Today I wrote a little dispatcher that uses threads to implement send/suspend. In this implementation, _send_ing truly _suspend_s the computation.

Here’s the code: http://www.copypastecode.com/codes/view/5003

The trick is to have channels for communicating responses and requests. When you run this example, you should be able to add two numbers. But, in contrast to the normal send/suspend, all the URLs are one-shots, because once the computation is resumed, it moves forward… it is never saved.

This implementation technique also precludes clever implementations of send/suspend/dispatch, like:

(define (send/suspend/dispatch mk-page)
  (let/cc k0
    (send/back
     (mk-page
      (lambda (handler)
        (let/ec k1 
          (k0 (handler (send/suspend k1)))))))))

As Shriram pointed out in email, he and I conjectured that there was an intimate relationship between s/s and call/cc in 2002. When I then gave my Oxford lecture, some German attendees (from Mike’s or Peter’s group, I believe) implemented call/cc via s/s. Question is what this really means.

— matthias, 6 May 2009