[erlang-questions] Scoped group leaders

[Ulf Wiger]

On 4 Jul 2011, at 16:15, Eric Merritt wrote:

> I can actually see a ton of uses for this. Not the least of which is
> security, I just did a deep security piece in an erlang app, and it
> turned out well, but I could see where something like this would have
> made it much more elegant

How, exactly?

The things that are difficult to do today, in terms of security in Erlang, is to *enforce* security in a way that cannot be subverted.

Group leaders are natural for IO, since IO necessarily involves sending a message to some entity. Some other things are overloaded - e.g. the application controller using the group leader to find out which application a process belongs to. That is a clear case where I think this would be useful: an "application group leader". But for security, I don't see it solving any of the problems I consider difficult - perhaps this is my failing: after having implemented reasonably transparent security in ErlHive, I get all kinds of associations to nasty problems that wouldn't be helped by this suggestion. But perhaps you are viewing it from a different angle?

BR,
Ulf W

Ulf Wiger, CTO, Erlang Solutions, Ltd.
http://erlang-solutions.com