Concurrency-related Updates
Tuesday, September 12, 2006
There have been a few interesting things happening in the concurrency space
recently, and I felt it worthwhile to dump these to a blog entry just
so that I keep track of them (and others might find them useful too).
As I mentioned in an
earlier post, this year's Erlang Workshop
and Scheme Workshop will be held in Portland, Oregon, on September 16
and 17 respectively.
Here are the relevant links:
http://www.erlang.se/workshop/2006/
http://scheme2006.cs.uchicago.edu/
Guillaume Germain, Marc Feeley, and Stefan Monnier will be giving a presentation on
Termite, a Gambit library that adds Erlang-like concurrency constructs
to Scheme (which I've posted about previously
here,
here,
here).
The paper for the presentation is already
available online. It is an
updated version of the Termite paper that was made available following the
2nd European LISP and Scheme Workshop.
CL-MUPROC (an Erlang-inspired multiprocessing package for Common Lisp)
now works on Lispworks, OpenMCL, SBCL, CMUCL, and Allegro Common Lisp. Although CL-MUPROC processes are currently
more "heavy-weight" than Erlang-style processess, it is a useful
package for experimenting with Erlang approaches in CL. At some stage
in the future, it would be nice to have support for light-weight
processes in CL-MUPROC.
There have been a rash of Erlang blog
postings recently. Of particular interest have been some ones from new bloggers
Yariv Sadan (a recent Erlang convert) and
Joe Armstrong (the creator of Erlang). Have a look at
Planet Erlang for a summary. In addition,
LShift (quite an interesting "pure technology" company that I
visited when I was in the UK
last year) are doing a few things with Erlang and there are a
number of interesting posts on their blog (Note: LShift's blog isn't
included in Planet Erlang):
- The definitive programming language, not (Note: the referenced article and slides by Peter Van Roy are well worth downloading)
- Static analysis of Erlang communication
- Fair messaging in Erlang
- Random in Erlang
- How fast can Erlang create processes
- How fast can Erlang send messages
- Erlang processes vs Java threads
