[erlang-questions] Semaphores

[Corrado Santoro]

Richard Carlsson wrote:
>>I am curious about this. Is the latency of sending a message so high that
>>it affects a robot? It seems to be (from a quick non very reliable test :) 
>>more or less in the single digits microseconds. 
>>
>>I do not think that using shared memory with semaphores would be
>>much faster (if at all), but of course I have not made any measurements :)
My first idea was to have some *native constructs* (BIFs) to allow 
sharing of erlang primitive data types (I'm not talking about "memory 
buffers"). Something like "put" and "get", but inter-process. So 
semaphores were internal things of the VM, not visible to Erlang 
programmers.


> I believe that their latency problems were due to messages being passed
> through layers of processes, so that queueing and process scheduling
> affected the total end-to-end time. (But I could be wrong.) My guess is,
> anyway, that restructuring the program could have solved the problem.
Indeed this is the point! If you take a look at the code of gen_server 
or gen_fsm, you can notice that both make strong use of the "gen" and 
other modules. This is due to the fact that (I suppose) "gen" implements 
many "general purpose" routines that can be used by gen_fsm/gen_server 
behaviours. Undoubtedly, this implies a great overhead in the code.

This is the reason why we decided to rebuild a "timed-fsm" behaviour, 
making it very light. We made some tests today: prompt response and good 
performances!

--Corrado

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