[2] It is a dialect of Standard ML, augmented with support for lazy evaluation, concurrency (multithreading and distributed computing via remote procedure calls) and constraint programming.
Alice extends Standard ML in a number of ways that distinguish it from its predecessor.
It is free software, and features just-in-time compilation to bytecode and native code for the x86 architecture.
Alice extends Standard ML with several primitives for lazy evaluation and concurrency.
This computation can be performed in a separate thread by The variable x is now bound to a so-called future.