This article has been given a more permanent home on my blog. Also, since it was first written, the development of the Promises/A+ specification has made the original emphasis on Promises/A seem somewhat outdated.
Promises are a software abstraction that makes working with asynchronous operations much more pleasant. In the most basic definition, your code will move from continuation-passing style:
getTweetsFor("domenic", function (err, results) {
// the rest of your code goes here.
Now located at https://github.com/JeffPaine/beautiful_idiomatic_python.
Github gists don't support Pull Requests or any notifications, which made it impossible for me to maintain this (surprisingly popular) gist with fixes, respond to comments and so on. In the interest of maintaining the quality of this resource for others, I've moved it to a proper repo. Cheers!
| This work, excluding the Arch Linux logo, is made available under CC0: https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ |
Note: this was originally several Reddit posts, chained and linked. But now that Reddit is dying I've finally moved them out. Sorry about the mess.
URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/comments/up206c/stack_machines_for_compilers/i8ikupw/ Summary: stack-based vs register-based in general.
There are a wide variety of machines that can be described as "stack-based" or "register-based", but not all of them are practical. And there are a lot of other decisions that affect that practicality (do variables have names or only address/indexes? fixed-width or variable-width instructions? are you interpreting the bytecode (and if so, are you using machine stack frames?) or turning it into machine code? how many registers are there, and how many are special? how do you represent multiple types of variable? how many scopes are there(various kinds of global, local, member, ...)? how much effort/complexity can you afford to put into your machine? etc.)