[eeps] Per-module process registration

[Richard O'Keefe]

On Feb 9, 2010, at 11:23 PM, Håkan Mattsson wrote:

> On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 5:49 AM, Richard O'Keefe <ok@REDACTED>  
> wrote:
>
>> A proposal for per-module registries with atomic registration.
>
> Is this really needed? If you let the newly spawned process register
> its own name, you don't get the race condition. Processes that fails
> to register its own name will simply crash.

There are several issues, not all of them explained in the EEP.
*ONE* is the race issue.  A newly spawned process doesn't *have*
a name, I presume you mean its pid.  If someone can explain to
me _how_ having a process register itself makes the totality of
start/Whatever easier to get right than the spawn_if_necessary/2
I described, I would be grateful.

Perhaps the *major* issue is the total lack of encapsulation.
The registry is, by design and intent, *global*.  Every registered
process is visible, not merely within its node, but to every
process in every node in a connected set of nodes.

There are times when you want that, but the vast majority of cases
in the Erlang/OTP sources that I checked used the global registry
but were constructed as if the process were private.