Parallel Computing in Lisp - Part 4
Saturday, July 16, 2005
I have written about Parallel Computing in Lisp a number of times before (see here, here, here, here). Well, the 2nd European LISP and Scheme Workshop (co-located with ECCOP 2005 and to be held on July 26 in Glasgow, Scotland) has a presentation scheduled on "Termite: a Lisp for Distributed Computing":
"Termite is a language and system offering a simple and powerful tool for expressing distributed computation which is based on a message-passing model of concurrency inspired by Erlang and a variant of the functional language Scheme.The presentation and paper are available online.
Our system is an appropriate tool for building custom protocols and abstractions for distributed computation. Its open network model allows for the building of non-centralized distributed applications. The possibility of failure is reflected in the model and ways to handle them are proposed. The existence of first-class continuations is exploited in order to allow the expression of high-level concepts such as transparent migration of processes."
It looks like Patrick Logan is also interested in seeing Termite and is not impressed by concurrency work being done in C# and Java. He comments that "Languages from the best of "the 60s" like Lisp and Smalltalk, have not had to change much and are able to move into new concurrency models with much less baggage".
Termite runs on Gambit Scheme and was developed at the University of Montreal by Guillaume Germain, Marc Feeley, and Stefan Monnier. If you're interested in concurrency in Lisp, you might also want to have a look at a number of the papers on Marc Feeley's university web page. A large collection of links to other concurrency-related material is also available on Dirk Gerrits' site.
