[erlang-questions] Frames proposal

[Thomas Lindgren]

>________________________________
> From: Steve Davis <steven.charles.davis@REDACTED>
...
>I'd like to add support for both the introduction of frames (and for the EEP 20 on "splitting atoms"). They appear to me to solve fairly pressing issues.


Regarding atom garbage collection, I'd also recommend OTP to check if there's anything useful in my old paper, inventively named "Atom Garbage Collection", Erlang Workshop 2005. Give me a call if it's too obscure (as I recall, it didn't really set the world on fire). 

Two comments on EEP 20 (I looked at this one: http://www.erlang.org/eeps/eep-0020.html ):

1. EEP 20 doesn't mention handling of message passing or similar scenarios as far as I can see. Perhaps there should be an implementation study where someone could figure out what's the best policy. E.g., should local atoms be globalized when sent? Or should there be translation at sender and/or receiver? Or something else? 

2. Towards the end, leaking global atoms is mentioned. This can in principle happen not only maliciously or by error, but also by upgrading your code sufficiently many times or in other situations where valid external data containing atoms arrives. So while using local atoms reduces the problem of running out of atom table, some way of collecting the global atoms would still be useful. The paper above is one proposal for this.

Best,
Thomas