ensure_started

[Ulf Wiger]

On Mon, 24 Mar 2003, Joe Armstrong wrote:

>I often wonder why we made spawn/3 a primitive and not just
>spawn a "universal" empty process and then send it a
>message telling it what to do.
>
>
>	Pid = spawn()
>	Pid ! Fun()
>
>where
>
>	spawn() ->
>	   spawn(fun() ->
>		   receive
>			Fun ->
>			   Fun()
>		   end
>		 end).
>
>  This is particularly useful when you need to setup sets
>of mutually recursive processes, then you can say:
>
>	Pid1 = spawn()
>	Pid2 = spawn(),
>	Pid1 ! fun() -> ... Pid2 ... end,
>	Pid2 ! fun() -> ... Pid1 ... end,
>
>  /Joe

Interesting... but how long should a universal process live
before it gives up waiting for a fun thing to do?

Or should empty unreferenced processes be garbage-collected?
This would require a unified heap, or reference-counted
pids. Oh well, nothing that couldn't have been solved. (:

BTW, the reason you didn't do this from the beginning was
that Erlang didn't have funs back then.  ;-)

/Uffe
-- 
Ulf Wiger, Senior Specialist,
   / / /   Architecture & Design of Carrier-Class Software
  / / /    Strategic Product & System Management
 / / /     Ericsson AB, Connectivity and Control Nodes