Bill Clementson's Blog

CL-MUPROC Update

Tuesday, July 11, 2006

I have posted about CL-MUPROC before. I'm quite excited about the ongoing effort to develop "Erlang-inspired multiprocessing in Common Lisp" and have been following developments on the cl-muproc-devel mailing list. Originally, CL-MUPROC only worked on LispWorks; however, it now runs on 4 CL implementations: LispWorks, OpenMCL, SBCL, and CMUCL. Rudi Schlatte and Vladimir Sekissov appear to be the ones who have been doing the majority of the porting work to OpenMCL and SBCL.

In other CL-MUPROC developments, Klaus is looking at using the serialization protocol for arbitrary Lisp objects that Arthur Lemmens developed as part of Rucksack (a CL prevalence package) in CL-MUPROC as a method for sending Lisp objects between machines. Although still in a very early stage (and a lot more work needs to be done), this will potentially be one of the components in a distributed version of CL-MUPROC. Since CL-MUPROC currently relies on the underlying CL implementation for multi-processing support and most (all?) popular CL implementations don't really scale well beyond a few hundred threads, being able to utilize multiple processors will expand the types of things that can be done with CL-MUPROC.

In addition to the latest tarball, Klaus Harbo has also made available a read-only darcs repository of the development code. To get the latest CL-MUPROC development code, do a:

darcs get http://www.mu.dk/cl-muproc/src