Concurrent programs often make use of future, which are handles to the results of asynchronous operations. Futures provide an instantly available means to communicate not yet computed results, and simplify the implementation of operations that must synchronise on the result of such asynchronous operations. Futures can be characterised as either implicit or explicit, depending on the typing discipline used to type them.

Existing approaches to implementing futures suffer from ``future proliferation'', either at the type-level or at run-time. The former manifests itself through the addition of future type wrappers which expose the client to the asynchronous message indirections of an implementation and hinders subtype polymorphism. The latter manifests itself through increased latency, by traversing nested future structures at run-time. Many languages suffer both kinds.

Previous work offer partial solutions to these problems of future proliferation; in this paper we show how these solutions can be integrated in an elegant and coherent way which is more expressive than either system in isolation. We describe our proposal formally, and state and prove its key properties, in two related calculi, based on the two possible families of future constructs (data-flow futures and control-flow futures). The first calculus relies on static type information to avoid unwanted future creation and the second uses an algebraic data type with dynamic checks. We also discuss how to implement our new system efficiently.