BEAM implementation questions

[Thomas Lindgren]

--- Richard Carlsson <richardc@REDACTED> wrote:

> There is surprisingly little slack in the semantics
> of receive (sometimes this can be a bit of a problem
> for implementors).

Yet even if we use the Core Erlang definition, it's
still lax enough to permit other implementations with
the same functional behaviour, I'm sure you'll agree.

Taking a broader view, the semantics you mention in
the Core Erlang specification is very operational, but
one could also go for more denotational (or at least
higher-level) versions. 

The message passing guarantees I seem to recall seeing
in the Erlang documentation are fairly freewheeling
about order of delivery of messages sent, for example.
(Though I can't seem to find the passage I was
thinking about, so I'll have to mumble a bit here ...
:-) 

An Erlang implementation (a perverse one?) could
conceivably exploit that, for instance.

(Well, this could probably be expressed better, but
I'll have to leave it at that.)

Best,
Thomas



		
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