Clementson's Blog

CL-MUPROC - Erlang-style Concurrent Programming in CL

Monday, May 15, 2006

At the ECLM meeting in Hamburg on April 30th, Klaus Harbo gave his presentation on "cl-muproc: Erlang-inspired multiprocessing in Common Lisp" (I mentioned cl-muproc in an earlier post). He indicated at the meeting that he would soon be making his code available under a BSD license. Well, he announced the release yesterday:

"I am pleased to announce that CL-MUPROC is now available at http://www.common-lisp.net/project/cl-muproc. As you will see, the reference documentation is far from complete; only the core functionality is documented at this time.

Please do feel free to try it out and offer any feed-back, comments, suggestions, or whatever (patches, even! ;-)."

1. Lightweight processes: Currently CL-MUPROC depends on the underlying Lisp's process/thread support. Erlang can scale to thousands of processes, something that is definitely not doable in the current implementation of CL-MUPROC.
2. Distributed processes: The current implementation CL-MUPROC does not provide support for distributed processes (although this is something that Klaus had been planning for eventually).
3. Support for other CL Implementations: At the moment, LispWorks is the only CL implementation that is supported. However, Klaus has isolated most of the LispWorks-specific code into a single source member (muproc-compat.lisp) and he has tried to use ACL-COMPAT for some things in order to further reduce the implementation-specific code. Some individuals have indicated that they are interested in creating ports to other CL-implementations; however, the source code has only been available for one day so we might have to wait a few more days for some ports to appear! ;-)

• CL-MUPROC-specific:
  • The CL-MUPROC documentation
  • Klaus Harbo's ECLM presentation on "cl-muproc: Erlang-inspired multiprocessing in Common Lisp"
  • The cl-muproc-devel mailing list
• Erlang-specific:
  • The Erlang Tutorial
  • The Erlang web site
• Concurrent/Distributed/Parallel processing in Lisp:
  • Some of the material linked to from my previous posts on Concurrent/Distributed/Parallel processing in Lisp (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here)