[Chicago] Erlang Envy, was Re: Stackless

[Pete]

On Tuesday June 5 2007 2:45 pm, David Terrell wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 05, 2007 at 02:36:20PM -0500, Pete wrote:
> > All that said, a nice protocol for inter-process (or box) message passing
> > (*not* shared state, thank you very much SOAP/WS-*/RPC) would certainly
> > be desirable & make writing multi-process apps easier than multi-threaded
> > ones.
>
> Yep.  As it stands, I'm writing most of my new concurrent code
> in erlang these days, which is a shame because python's a much
> deeper language overall.

You might want to check out http://candygram.sourceforge.net , which 
implements the Erlang primitives in Python using threads.[0] They go through 
interesting examples: http://candygram.sourceforge.net/node6.html

I'm also working on Erlang-inspired [1] message passing framework as part of 
my larger project, early alpha, blah blah[2]: 
http://grassyknoll.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/grassyknoll/plaza/

It's threads only & I'm still working out the kinks.  It's based on Queue, 
which I mentioned before.  There's no IPC yet - as Chris notes, process 
control is a PITA on Linux, let alone cross platform.  I do have a WSGI 
server though, which seems to work ok.[3]

As for Erlang, it looks neat, but I'm not programming cell phone towers.  Give 
me separate address spaces & message passing (from PyPy or anywhere else), 
but I'm keeping my Python.  Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Hey, are we having a meeting this month?

--Pete

[0] Yes, it's threads & no, there's no per-process address space.

[1] inspired, as in, "I skimmed the _Concurrent Programming in Erlang_ book 
while drinking."

[2] http://code.google.com/p/grassyknoll/

[3] At some point, I want to implement a Queue-like API on HTTP with REST-like 
semantics. See 
http://grassyknoll.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/grassyknoll/plaza/MailBox.py

-- 
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