TOtodsacerdoti·Feb 19, 2025Submission
Proposal: Starting tasks synchronously from caller context
1 points · Open discussionktoso
swift-evolution
JavaScript2021–2025
ktoso / swift-evolution
swift-evolution
This maintains proposals for changes and user-visible enhancements to the Swift Programming Language.
3Distinct people
3Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
5GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
This maintains proposals for changes and user-visible enhancements to the Swift Programming Language.
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:03:16 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year3 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2021-08-15 12:05:27 UTC to 2025-02-19 11:18:59 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
What Hacker News says
3 sourcesThis blog post is an announcement for a wide audience. In the proposal[1], which gives detail on motivations and implementation, there is an "Acknowledgements & Prior Art" section that mentions Akka, Orleans, Erlang, and Elixir.
[1]: https://github.com/ktoso/swift-evolution/blob/distributed-re...
In Swift Distributed ActorsIf an actor system is fully synchronous, it is much less efficient and can't be reentrant.
Actor implementations tend to be split on reentrancy. Having multiple paused in-flight invocations of the actor means that you need to have clearly understood suspension points (hence await keywords). Non-reentrant actors like in Erlang can deadlock if two actor instances are calling one another. Because of the deadlock and some inefficiency concerns, some actor systems allow you to decide reentrancy per-actor as well.
Because Swift concurrency is an upgrade on top of decades-old systems, I believe a certain amount of additional complexity was required whether it was built as reentrant or not.
It was a bit harder to find than I expected, but here is a discussion piece around the initial choice of reentrancy by default. https://github.com/ktoso/swift