[erlang-questions] Message order and exit(Reason)

[Ignas Vyšniauskas]

On 01/28/2013 10:34 PM, Rickard Green wrote:
> The only signal ordering guarantee given is the following. If an
> entity sends multiple signals to the same destination entity, the
> order will be preserved. That is, if A send a signal S1 to B, and
> later sends the signal S2 to B, S1 is guaranteed not to arrive after
> S2.

But this is true only for single-node semantics/settings, correct?

At least I this paper[1]  by Koen Claessen and Hans Svensson claims that:

> In Fredlund’s semantics the delivery of a message is instantaneous,
> meaning that all messages are delivered in exactly the order they are
> sent. Now, this is actually true for processes running on the same
> node, due to how the Erlang runtime system is implemented. It is,
> however, not true in general for a concurrency oriented programming
> language, and specifically not in a distributed setting with several
> different Erlang nodes.

In general, they have a similar example to the one described in this
thread where problems with the exit signal appear in Chapter 5 and conclude:

> After Fredlund proposed his single-node semantics, it was at least
> thought ”morally OK” to use this semantics to reason about and model
> distributed systems. However, messages actually can and do
> arrive in different orders in a distributed setting as compared to a
> local setting. A simple experiment involving 3 nodes already shows
> this, even when the nodes are implemented as 3 run-time systems
> running on the same workstation! Moreover, we discovered that the
> above was not merely a theoretical anomaly, but an actual problem
> with a real-life implementation. Along the same lines, many Erlang
> developers think it morally OK to test their distributed system on a
> single node. For the same reasons as mentioned above, errors might
> slip through.

There's also a more recent one[2] by Hans Svensson.

So I guess the moral is that it's not all so simple and nice when you
"really" start distributing and it's not a good idea to make strong
assumptions even about the tiniest details.

Regards,
Ignas

[1]:  "A Semantics for Distributed Erlang", 2005:
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.101.9412
[2]:  "A more accurate semantics for distributed Erlang", 2007: 
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.102.1723
<http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.102.1723>