5 ms·

Termite : Erlang-style concurrency for Gambit Scheme

11 points by vorador 17y ago

Scramblejams 17y ago
This looks very cool -- I was totally stoked when it first came out several years ago. Sadly it looks to not be very active. Last commit seems to be in May, then 2008 before that...
- andrewcooke 17y ago
  back when i tried using it (also several years ago), i was pretty disappointed. i can no longer remember the details, but i much preferred erlang (despite preferring scheme to erlang from a language pov). i looked back through my blog and found this comment - http://www.acooke.org/cute/TermitevEr0.html http://www.acooke.org/cute/TermitevEr0.html "Even when Termite works (and I couldn't get it to work reliably), it differs in functionality compared to Erlang. A single Gambit instance is a single process - its "threading" is implemented using continuations - and so (unlike Erlang) it cannot automatically use a dual core. ... [I]f you want a system that just works, use Erlang.
  - mononcqc 17y ago
    That's okay, though. Concurrency =/= parallelism. The most important part is being able to build independent blocks that can interact. Having them run at the same time is just a nicety on top of it, but it's in no way essential. Erlang worked that way from the 80s until 2006, when it started supporting SMP in R11B.
  - anonjon 17y ago
    lisp flavored Erlang is pretty cute. http://github.com/rvirding/lfe http://github.com/rvirding/lfe If you like lisp, and you like Erlang, I think that it is the way to go. It compiles to .beam files and runs on the regular VM. I have yet to use it for anything 'serious' but in the toy projects that I have used it for it has been quite good. All that it really needs is more people using it.
vlisivka 17y ago
Erlang-style messaging in bash 4.0 :-) http://vlisivka.pp.ua/uk/erlang_sh http://vlisivka.pp.ua/uk/erlang_sh
jerf 17y ago
It does look more complete than most things that claim to be "Erlang-style", including the idea of "links" and the ability for messages to go between machines, two things typically forgotten when a language tries to wrap itself in the phrase "Erlang-style". Can't speak to the quality itself since I've never tried it. I just wanted to post this since claiming to be "Erlang-style" while not implementing any of the functionality that actually makes Erlang different (links, automatic cross-machine serialization, OTP) is becoming a pet peeve.
bulanga 17y ago
Does anyone know how processes are implemented in termite? I remember looking at candygram a while ago (erlang style message passing for python) and reading that a 'process' uses the OS's underlying thread so you can't scale the number of processes like you could on erlang. Not that it's been a bottleneck for me but I'm just curious.

11 points by vorador 17y ago

This looks very cool -- I was totally stoked when it first came out several years ago. Sadly it looks to not be very active. Last commit seems to be in May, then 2008 before that...

andrewcooke 17y ago
back when i tried using it (also several years ago), i was pretty disappointed. i can no longer remember the details, but i much preferred erlang (despite preferring scheme to erlang from a language pov). i looked back through my blog and found this comment - http://www.acooke.org/cute/TermitevEr0.html http://www.acooke.org/cute/TermitevEr0.html "Even when Termite works (and I couldn't get it to work reliably), it differs in functionality compared to Erlang. A single Gambit instance is a single process - its "threading" is implemented using continuations - and so (unlike Erlang) it cannot automatically use a dual core. ... [I]f you want a system that just works, use Erlang.
- mononcqc 17y ago
  That's okay, though. Concurrency =/= parallelism. The most important part is being able to build independent blocks that can interact. Having them run at the same time is just a nicety on top of it, but it's in no way essential. Erlang worked that way from the 80s until 2006, when it started supporting SMP in R11B.
- anonjon 17y ago
  lisp flavored Erlang is pretty cute. http://github.com/rvirding/lfe http://github.com/rvirding/lfe If you like lisp, and you like Erlang, I think that it is the way to go. It compiles to .beam files and runs on the regular VM. I have yet to use it for anything 'serious' but in the toy projects that I have used it for it has been quite good. All that it really needs is more people using it.

vlisivka 17y ago

Erlang-style messaging in bash 4.0 :-) http://vlisivka.pp.ua/uk/erlang_sh http://vlisivka.pp.ua/uk/erlang_sh

jerf 17y ago

It does look more complete than most things that claim to be "Erlang-style", including the idea of "links" and the ability for messages to go between machines, two things typically forgotten when a language tries to wrap itself in the phrase "Erlang-style". Can't speak to the quality itself since I've never tried it. I just wanted to post this since claiming to be "Erlang-style" while not implementing any of the functionality that actually makes Erlang different (links, automatic cross-machine serialization, OTP) is becoming a pet peeve.

bulanga 17y ago

Does anyone know how processes are implemented in termite? I remember looking at candygram a while ago (erlang style message passing for python) and reading that a 'process' uses the OS's underlying thread so you can't scale the number of processes like you could on erlang. Not that it's been a bottleneck for me but I'm just curious.