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Ask HN: A distributed x86_64 emulator atop Erlang/OTP/Elixir. Feasible?

• detaro 11y ago
  "distributed"?
  • josh-wrale 11y ago
    Many physical machines, one emulated machine.
    • detaro 11y ago
      Possible, but I don't think it would be useful, since there would be to much synchronization overhead that would interrupt execution way to often.
      • josh-wrale 11y ago
        Cool. Thanks!
• lectrick 11y ago
  Computations can't be just "parallelized" in any automatic fashion. The code has to be written in such a way that it understands it's running concurrently. So splitting up an emulation of a single machine into multiple execution units isn't really feasible. It could SORT of work if the execution was split up by process, but then you'd run into the fact that Erlang isn't very fast at math.
  • josh-wrale 11y ago
    Makes sense. I was thinking the emulation could have a single virtual core to enforce the non-parallelism within a process. Beneath the emulation, I was hoping to field out processes. However, I see that's not feasible. Thanks for your help!