The State of Axum

Those who have followed this blog will have noticed that it’s been a long time since we posted anything new about Axum, and the time has come to state publicly that which may have been clear to some but not others, that we’re not currently pursuing productization.

We have seriously examined the possibility of releasing the source code under an OSS license, but that, too, will require time that we don’t have that much of. At this time, no one is assigned paid hours to work on Axum, but we are still entertaining fantasies about an open-source release sometime in the future by doing some extra work during down times.

That said, the incubation effort was very successful in our opinion: several of the concepts embodied in Axum live on in the next versions of C# and .NET: C# and VB will support their own form of asynchronous methods, while .NET is adding support for data-flow constructs following the patterns we set up in Axum and the C++ concurrency runtime.

On the other hand, the concepts around safe parallelism and agent-based programming were seen by many as too far outside the mainstream to be adopted now in languages like C# and VB. The idea of Axum was to not force these concepts on general-purpose languages, so those of us who have work on Axum are not surprised.

It’s disappointing to have to post this kind of entry, but it’s better to acknowledge the situation than to stick our heads in the sand and pretend that everything’s OK.

 

Niklas, Artur & Josh
Axumites