ANNOUNCE - graphics package

[Taj Khattra]

i forgot to mention that www.vitanuova.com/inferno also includes
an acme port, so that makes it 3 ways to run acme - plan9 (native
or vmware), inferno and rsc's unix port.

anyways, to bring this back on topic for the erlang list :)

Joe's recent advocacy of bang bang 'everything is a process' is
sort of reminiscent of plan9 and inferno's advocacy of 'present
all resources as files in a hierarchical name space' [*]

one fundamental difference seems to be that in bang bang, message
passing and distribution is explicit, whereas in the plan9 approach
the interface is fixed (standard open/close/read/write etc. file
ops) and the 9P message glue lives transparently underneath.

vitanuova has recently begun to exploit the 9P approach in the grid
arena (check their website).  it would be interesting to see what
an erlang based grid architecture would look like.

-taj


[*] Rob Pike and Dennis Ritchie wrote a nice paper on this in the
bell labs technical journal a few years ago - see
www.vitanuova.com/inferno/papers/styx.html (a pdf of the bltj
original is at pobox.com/~taj.khattra/paper09.pdf )