In computer science, future, promise, delay, and deferred refer to constructs used for synchronizing program execution in some concurrent programming languages. They describe an object that acts as a proxy for a result that is initially unknown, usually because the computation of its value is not yet complete.
The term promise was proposed in 1976 by Daniel P. Friedman and David Wise,[1] and Peter Hibbard called it eventual.[2] A somewhat similar concept future was introduced in 1977 in a paper by Henry Baker and Carl Hewitt.[3]
The terms future, promise, delay, and deferred are often used interchangeably, although some differences in usage between future and promise are treated below. Specifically, when usage is distinguished, a future is a read-only placeholder view of a variable, while a promise is a writable, single assignment container which sets the value of the future. Notably, a future may be defined without specifying which specific promise will set its value, and different possible promises may set the value of a given future, though this can be done only once for a given future. In other cases a future and a promise are created together and associated with each other: the future is the value, the promise is the function that sets the value – essentially the return value (future) of an asynchronous function (promise). Setting the value of a future is also called resolving, fulfilling, or binding it.