Google Reader and "continuations"

Reading this I got curious, so I did some googling (natrually). This is what I came up with.

If someone knows more, please share!

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Just because the element is

Just because the element is named "continuation" doesn't mean that they are using continuations on the server in the Scheme sense of the term.

That much is obvious.

That much is obvious.

Culture

But given Google's technical culture, it's quite likely that they are.

A Contination in name only...

I wrote a continuation-based web thing in PHP while I was at IBM. It was never used, for good reason, the reason being that it was a mess. Plus, after I'd left, it would have been seen as a piece of black magic. In any case, it wasn't actual continuations, more a very restricted co-threading mechanism, where one of the threads was the other end.

So it wasn't even a co-threading library.

But I still called various things continuations, because that was the mental model that I was going for. I wouldn't rule out an actual continuations implementation in the back for Google, but in the interests of delivering things, etc. it's probably more likely just a reflection of what the architect's mind was thinking at the time.