[erlang-bugs] http://www.erlang.org/faq/academic.html - section 10.23 with respect to shared heap needs correction?

[Matthias Lang]

On Thursday, November 29, Joseph Wayne Norton wrote:

> I noticed the last statement of section 10.23 with respect to shared
> heap.  It seems this feature is no longer supported or is
> undocumented?  If it is still present, could you point me to the
> appropriate documentation?

The shared/hybrid heaps are gone as of at least ERTS 5.9.2, according
to the release notes (OTP-10105):

  http://www.erlang.org/doc/apps/erts/notes.html

Thanks for pointing out that the FAQ still talks about them. For now,
I've fixed it by removing the last paragraph from the FAQ entry. It'll
automagically propagate to erlang.org, probably within an hour.

To someone who knows: is the description of GC in that section still
correct? Specifically, does GC of one process still freeze all other
processes, even when running SMP?

If your (Joseph's) main interest in this is trying out the shared and
hybrid heap, then the only way I know of is to go back to the Erlang
versions which supported it. A good start is probably ERTS 5.4.9
(somewhere in the R10B-x series). Here's one I had lying around:

  otp_src_R10B-10 >bin/erl -hybrid
  Erlang (BEAM) emulator version 5.4.13 [64-bit] [source] [hybrid heap]

A bit of googling gives some background to the shared/hybrid
emulator's fate:

  http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2009-September/046428.html
  http://www.trapexit.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2956&sid=d3c1c76aa5e04465902c071efa7195ba

Matt