Coroutines with Higher Order Functions

12/19/2018

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by   Dimitri Racordon, et al.

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Coroutines are non-preemptive concurrent subroutines that, unlike preemptive threads, voluntarily transfer control between each others. Introduced in the 60s before loosing in popularity in the 80s, they have seen a regain of interest in recent years, thanks to how elegantly they can solve numerous algorithmic problems. Unfortunately, some mainstream languages still lack support for coroutines, hence requiring either the use of non-standard interpreter/compilers, or elaborate hacks in thrid-party libraries. In this short paper, we propose a very simple way to implement coroutine-like components on the top of any language that support or can emulate higher order functions. We accompany our explanations with a handful of examples in JavaScript.