Erlang style processes in Common Lisp

[Stelian Ionescu]

> Creators of Erlang have a Lisp background, and one feature of the Erlang 
> VM (BEAM) that I'd like back-ported into Common Lisp is their process.
> 
> An Erlang "process" is cheap to create, cheap to destroy, cheap when 
> blocked, and upon exit performs bulk gc of its allocated memory; e.g., 
> munmap().
> 
> Handling tens of thousands of requests per second per node isn't 
> uncommon, and these often have *several* workers per request or 
> connection: hundreds of thousands of processes.  Under such scenarios, 
> anything less than this approach to lightweight processes might suffer 
> from stalls during long gc runs that would be avoided or significantly 
> reduced under Erlang's model.
> 
> 
> How might we get equivalent cheap ephemeral processes into a 
> contemporary Common Lisp implementation?

In short, you need to write from scratch a new CL implementation. Current ones are not designed with the Erlang constraints in mind.

-- 
Stelian Ionescu a.k.a. fe[nl]ix
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.
http://common-lisp.net/project/iolib