What are futures?

Question

What are futures? It\'s something to do with lazy evaluation.

Answer 1

Futures are also used in certain design patterns, particularly for real time patterns, for example, the ActiveObject pattern, which seperates method invocation from method execution. The future is setup to wait for the completed execution. I tend to see it when you need to move from a multithreaded enviroment to communicate with a single threaded environment. There may be instances where a piece of hardware doesn't have kernel support for threading, and futures are used in this instance. At first glance it not obvious how you would communicate, and surprisingly futures make it fairly simple. I've got a bit of c# code. I'll dig it out and post it.