Erlang style processes in Common Lisp

[David McClain]

I did something similar several years ago for Butterfly, where I pre-instantiate a pool of threads into the “stable”, and utilize a Grand Central Dispatch (real and / or simulated) to run various jobs. No sense killing the horses after they run the racetrack.

But this is still a far cry (a few dozen threads) from what Erlang and CML provide (numbering in the thousands).

- DM


> On Aug 3, 2015, at 12:46 PM, Faré <fahree at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Mon, Aug 3, 2015 at 3:36 PM, Attila Lendvai <attila at lendvai.name <mailto:attila at lendvai.name>> wrote:
>>>> 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.
>> 
>> well, Nikodemus had some plans for green threads for SBCL and it
>> didn't sound like a rewrite.
>> 
>> and adding first class heaps would be a very useful addition with or
>> without any of the other erlang stuff. i don't know how hard that is,
>> but i assume it should be rather simple if the responsibility is
>> pushed over to the user to make sure that there are no dangling
>> pointers after destroying a heap.
>> 
>> or am i missing something?
>> 
> Not Common Lisp (yet), but Racket has custodians for first-class
> resource allocation pool, and all kinds of concurrency primitives.
> Since it's a programming language designed to implement other
> programming languages on top of it, it would make a great basis for a
> "new" common lisp implementation.
> 
> —♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org <http://fare.tunes.org/>
> There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil
> to one who is striking at the root. — Thoreau

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