More blogosphere echoes on continuations in JVM

Following people also reacted to Gilad Bracha's "no continuations in JVM" post (in alphabetical order):

Don Box

Tim Bray

Avi Bryant (developer of Seaside, continuations-based webapp framework in Smalltalk)

Miguel de Icaza (with a link to Ian Griffith's entry about continuations being considered harmful

David Megginson

All these posts revolve around whether webapps are a justifiable reason for bringing continuations in JVM. Now, I can actually agree they are not. However, there's precious little discussion out there about other reasons that are in fact justifiable reasons. At least on JVM, writing handlers for non-blocking socket I/O is one very practical usage. Writing distributed systems with execution location transparency and runtime migratability is other. Yet another is writing cooperative-threading systems where some domain-specific guarantee of scheduling fairness is explicitly encoded into the yielding policy of microthreads implemented by continuations. This would allow implementing i.e. a MMORPG server in Java, similar to how EVE online server-side is implemented in stackless Python, and according to its developers, they currently manage 26000 concurrent users on a 150 CPU cluster. It'd be a nice new server software market for JVM as well.