[erlang-questions] Concurrency-related optimizations

[Jacob Lee]

Greetings,

I am trying to do an undergraduate thesis on concurrency-related
optimizations as applied to a practical language. This is under the
supervision of Prof. Gul Agha, whose research area is the actor model
of computation (his 1986 book "Actors: a model of concurrent
computation in distributed systems" is a standard on the subject).

So, this semester I have lots of time to devote to trying to make
Erlang faster :-). My question for the general Erlang community is:
are there any optimizations that have been considered or suggested for
Erlang but not yet implemented? My focus is on concurrency-related
optimization: e.g., those related to scheduling or message passing.

As a start, I've been reading through the HiPE code and the papers
published by that team. There are also some general actor
optimizations in the literature that have not yet have been applied to
Erlang; I'll be looking to see if any of them are compatible with
Erlang's semantics. But if anyone has particular ideas that perhaps
haven't been tried for lack of time, I am very interested in learning
about them.

-- 
Jacob Lee
artdent@REDACTED