The F# Asynchronous Programming Model

Don Syme, Tomas Petricek and Dmitry Lomov

In Proceedings of PADL 2011

We describe the asynchronous programming model in F#, and its applications to reactive, parallel and concurrent programming. The key feature combines a core language with a non-blocking modality to author lightweight asynchronous tasks, where the modality has control flow constructs that are syntactically a superset of the core language and are given an asynchronous semantic interpretation.

This allows smooth transitions between synchronous and asynchronous code and eliminates callback-style treatments of inversion of control, without disturbing the foundation of CPU-intensive programming that allows F# to interoperate smoothly and compile efficiently. An adapted version of this approach has recently been announced for a future version of C#.

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Bibtex

If you want to cite the paper, you can use the following BibTeX information, or get full details from the paper page on ACM.

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@inproceedings{syme-2011-async,
  author    = {Don Syme and Tomas Petricek and Dmitry Lomov},
  title     = {The F{\#} Asynchronous Programming Model},
  booktitle = {Practical Aspects of Declarative Languages - 13th
               International Symposium, {PADL} 2011, Austin, TX, USA,
               January 24-25, 2011. Proceedings},
  series    = {Lecture Notes in Computer Science},
  volume    = {6539},
  pages     = {175--189},
  publisher = {Springer},
  year      = {2011},
  doi       = {10.1007/978-3-642-18378-2\_15}
}

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