Go through annotations and see if some should be promoted to 1st class concept

[brice-morin]

Possible good candidates (feel free to add more):

• @sync_send
• @fork_thread
• @type_checker
• @abstract, which in this case should be deprecated, since this is now a concept
• @c_header, which is quite similar to @java_import, dealing with package/namespace import that we find in most languages
• @c_global, @java_features, which allows to add target code at the beginning of the class/structure/whatever for the thing. Might maybe be generalized?

Good candidates are in general annotations not specific to a given platform, which we already use in different contexts.

We'll create individual issues once we agree on the final list.

[jakhog]

I don't know if I am supposed to put complaints here, but I have issues with the first two:

• @sync_send. In some languages, we cant do this, e.g. Go. There is no way to do this safely (since they are running in separate goroutines).
• @fork_thread. Some platforms don't have threads (like Arduino). So this wouldn't be that easy. And isn't this kind of why we have sessions?

[brice-morin]

Good points. @sync_send would also be a pain in Java.

For @fork_thread the idea is to allow for simple function-like listeners, which could be useful for external things. Like on entry you could call listenSerialPort, which somehow runs in a thread ("physically" or logically) and emits ThingML messages whenever somethings happens on the serial port. Doing that in a session is a bit overkill, as it forces us to have a statechart, etc when all we need is a function that runs in parallel of the rest.