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From what I understand, this would go further than Erlang, in that this can be a DAG of threads, not just a tree. I could be wrong, though; I'm not terribly fam

• hinkley 5y ago
  Elixir is perpetually at the top of my TODO list, but I don't make it much past the videos (I had a plan involving rasPi clones, which ended up being a bridge too far). I take your point about a tree versus a DAG. The supervisor tree is definitely a footgun of a sort and quite a few minutes of many videos is dedicated to ways to be successful with your supervisor tree. I suspect the tree was picked and stuck around so long in large part because it's the Simplest Thing That Could Work. But the BEAM has been tackling some headier topics of late. I'd be curious to see how much of this work could be grafted onto Erlang. DAGs are great, but they do take a bit more vigilance. In a large project there is always the risk of adding a back link somewhere and upsetting the whole thing. The product I work on has one DAG, and in fact I just fixed a nasty memory leak in the cycle detector we added a couple years ago to surface these bugs a bit more gently. Put another way: trees are statically stable, DAGS are dynamically stable. So it's down to whether what you accomplish with it is worth all of the effort. I predict if SC gets traction, that one of the videos will be about whether you actually need a DAG or whether your problem can be better represented as a tree. (Just because the feature exists, doesn't mean you need to use it on every project)