Acknowledge messages

Per Hedeland per@REDACTED
Tue Dec 31 13:40:55 CET 2002


Mickael Remond <mickael.remond@REDACTED> wrote:
>If your question is about being sure that the destination process have received
>a given message, the answer is no, there is no such garanty. This rely on your
>own protocol. Message passing in Erlang is said to rely on a "send and pray"
>mechanism. It is up to you to build the mechanism you need on top of it.

Well, without further qualification, and especially given to someone new
to Erlang, I think such a statement is rather misleading - it makes it
sound like Erlang would be prone to randomly dropping messages, like,
say, UDP. This is not the case, of course - if the recipient process
keeps running, the network (if needed) remains up, etc, every message
sent will also be received by the recipient (and there are mechanisms
available to make sure you get notified if one of the "bad" things that
might prevent this happens). See also:
http://www.erlang.org/ml-archive/erlang-questions/199910/msg00043.html

--Per Hedeland



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