Volta, Continuation-passing style

Over a year ago, I pointed to a particular pattern in C#, using delegates with asynchronous methods, that used continuation-passing style (CPS) to make writing scalable IO-heavy code easier:

A lot of work? Yes, but better than people who write business code for a living having to work in a nest of hand-written continuations just to get scalability.

If the folks advising asynchronous code are serious about recommending this approach to scalability, then the enabling tools need to be available. It's conceivable that the CLR could do this automatically, with some kind of [AutoAsync] attribute, along with a couple of utility methods to access the generated Begin/End pair via reflection or whatever. That would keep the C# language clean while leaving the CLR open to a lazy implementation approach (using ThreadPool threads), but also with the power to create the transformations discussed above.

Now it looks like some of the folks over at MS are having similar ideas, in their Volta preview. It's not quite the same, you have to write your async method in a particular way, but with the automatic transformation of the callsite into the appropriate format, it's a good step forward:

Asynchronous Calls

Hiding network latency requires asynchronous calls. In the first technology preview, Volta allows programmers to add asynchronous versions of methods on tier boundaries.

To make a method asynchronous, define the CPS-equivalent method signature and annotate it with the Async attribute. Volta will generate the body and modify the call-sites accordingly.

    [Async]
    public static void F(string s, Action k);

If the programmer invokes an asynchronous method F, then Volta will launch the invocation on another thread and invoke the continuation upon completion of the call to F.

I'm not entirely delighted with some of the ideology behind Volta - I don't think hiding the network's existence in and of itself is necessarily a good thing - but making the right kind of code easier to write is definitely a step in the right direction.