Go through annotations and see if some should be promoted to 1st class concept

TelluIoT / ThingML

The ThingML modelling language

https://github.com/TelluIoT/ThingML

Apache License 2.0

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Go through annotations and see if some should be promoted to 1st class concept #214

Open brice-morin opened 6 years ago

brice-morin commented 6 years ago

Possible good candidates (feel free to add more):

@sync_send
@fork_thread
@type_checker
@abstract, which in this case should be deprecated, since this is now a concept
@c_header, which is quite similar to @java_import, dealing with package/namespace import that we find in most languages
@c_global, @java_features, which allows to add target code at the beginning of the class/structure/whatever for the thing. Might maybe be generalized?

Good candidates are in general annotations not specific to a given platform, which we already use in different contexts.

We'll create individual issues once we agree on the final list.

jakhog commented 6 years ago

I don't know if I am supposed to put complaints here, but I have issues with the first two:

@sync_send. In some languages, we cant do this, e.g. Go. There is no way to do this safely (since they are running in separate goroutines).
@fork_thread. Some platforms don't have threads (like Arduino). So this wouldn't be that easy. And isn't this kind of why we have sessions?

brice-morin commented 6 years ago

Good points. @sync_send would also be a pain in Java.

For @fork_thread the idea is to allow for simple function-like listeners, which could be useful for external things. Like on entry you could call listenSerialPort, which somehow runs in a thread ("physically" or logically) and emits ThingML messages whenever somethings happens on the serial port. Doing that in a session is a bit overkill, as it forces us to have a statechart, etc when all we need is a function that runs in parallel of the rest.