Coroutines in Java
- by JUST MY correct OPINION
I would like to do some stuff in Java that would be clearer if written using concurrent routines, but for which full-on threads are serious overkill. The answer, of course, is the use of coroutines, but there doesn't appear to be any coroutine support in the standard Java libraries and a quick Google on it brings up tantalising hints here or there, but nothing substantial.
Here's what I've found so far:
JSIM has a coroutine class, but it looks pretty heavyweight and conflates, seemingly, with
threads at points. The point of this is to reduce the complexity of full-on threading, not to add to
it. Further I'm not sure that the class can be extracted from the library and used independently.
Xalan has a coroutine set class that does coroutine-like stuff, but again it's dubious if this
can be meaningfully extracted from the overall library. It also looks like it's implemented as a
tightly-controlled form of thread pool, not as actual coroutines.
There's a Google Code project which looks like what I'm after, but if anything it looks more
heavyweight than using threads would be. I'm basically nervous of something that requires software to
dynamically change the JVM bytecode at runtime to do its work. This looks like overkill and like
something that will cause more problems than coroutines would solve. Further it looks like it doesn't
implement the whole coroutine concept. By my glance-over it gives a yield feature that just returns
to the invoker. Proper coroutines allow yields to transfer control to any known coroutine directly.
Basically this library, heavyweight and scary as it is, only gives you support for iterators, not
fully-general coroutines.
The promisingly-named Coroutine for Java fails because it's a platform-specific (obviously using
JNI) solution.
And that's about all I've found.
I know about the native JVM support for coroutines in the Da Vinci Machine and I also know about the JNI continuations trick for doing this. These are not really good solutions for me, however, as I would not necessarily have control over which VM or platform my code would run on. (Indeed any bytecode manipulation system would suffer similar problems -- it would be best were this pure Java if possible. Runtime bytecode manipulation would restrict me from using this on Android, for example.)
So does anybody have any pointers? Is this even possible? If not, will it be possible in Java 7?
