continued init (RE: OTP or not to OTP)

[Shawn Pearce]

Sean Hinde <Sean.Hinde@REDACTED> wrote:
> But yes, otherwise you are correct of course. I do believe that we are
> slightly kidding ourselves when we say that Erlang makes concurrent
> programming easy* - it is easy (ish) to make simple 'object' type processes
> but it is possible to get into an enormous mess of deadlocks and so on if
> you try to get too tricky. This to me is another reason why gen_servers and
> so on are a good thing - they stop people trying to get too complex and then
> find that after a couple of months some weird network conition occurs which
> deadlocks the whole thing.

Ah, now we need gen_deadlock to perform deadlock detection by polling
gen_* processes with alive operations to verify they are still sane,
and if not, kill them so the supervisor restarts them.  :)

When can we expect to see gen_deadlock?  :)

> * Vastly easier than the pthreads type model favoured elsewhere of
> course,  but still not VB easy

You can do concurrent programming in VB?  You must be insane Sean.  :)

What I think Erlang does well is hide the easy stuff, so we only deal
with the hard stuff.  In other words, if we were doing this in C with
pthreads, we wouldn't have time to address the hard stuff, we'd only
have time to address the easy stuff, and ship.  Perhaps that's one
reason OTP works so well.

-- 
Shawn.

  You will overcome the attacks of jealous associates.