RFR 8020921 <was> Re: CompletableFuture updates and CompletionStage

[Paul Sandoz]

Hi,

Doug's explanation provides an excellent hook to hang the RFR off:

http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~psandoz/tl/JDK-8020291-completion-stage/specdiff/overview-summary.html

http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~psandoz/tl/JDK-8020291-completion-stage/webrev/

Paul.

On Jul 11, 2013, at 12:29 PM, Doug Lea <dl at cs.oswego.edu> wrote:

> 
> Last fall, when putting together class CompletableFuture, and when
> many issues surrounding lambdas and Streams were still up in the air,
> we postponed dealing with the question of how to extract out an
> interface that would support usages by those who need the fluent
> completion-style capabilities, but under different policies or
> mechanisms that cannot otherwise be captured using a single class. The
> lack of an interface was a serious problem because the variation among
> policies and methods beyond the base fluent methods is so wide and
> conflicting that some potential users wrote off CompletableFuture as
> unusable -- some need method X, some cannot allow that same method X,
> for X dealing with cancellation, blocking, overwrites, etc.
> 
> We finally last week settled this in an acceptable and simple way,
> introducing interface CompletionStage, that is nearly just a subset of
> existing CompletableFuture methods, and adjusting CompletableFuture
> accordingly, in a way that provides a recipe for creating
> interoperable CompletionStage implementations that may differ wrt
> those methods not in the CompletionStage interface.  The adjustments
> are small but still officially require CCC approval. We had to
> introduce a method form ("whenComplete") to deal with exceptional
> completions that otherwise required use of CompletableFuture-dependent
> methods. Plus a couple of utilities and some spec rewordings, and an
> overhaul of CompletableFuture class-level documentation to now
> reference CompletionStage.
> 
> After expert-group and concurrency-interest discussions, no one
> disagrees that this is an improvement. Some people have lingering
> disagreements about those policy issues, but are more content that
> there is now a straightforward way of obtaining the ones they want.
> 
> The updates have also been in lambda repo (although probably not used
> much) for about a week.
> 
> Paul Sandoz has volunteered to coordinate the CCC and webrev
> and will post the details. (Thanks Paul for adding this
> to your already overcomitted workload!)
> 
> -Doug
> 
>