[erlang-questions] A whole bunch of implementation details

[Richard A. O'Keefe]

On 5 Sep 2008, at 3:20 pm, Dennis Byrne wrote:

>
> Thank you Richard, Mikael and Raimo.  Here's another question I got  
> as a follow up.
>
> Can pids be reused, even though the documentation refers to them as  
> unique?  Any info on the underlying implementation of how a pid is  
> uniquely generated across a cluster?

A pid identifies
  - a process within
  - an incarnation of
  - a node.
The problem that's been referred to recently in this mailing list
is too few bits for incarnation numbers.
There was previously a problem with 'references' (which are
opaque tokens that don't in fact refer to anything) having too
few bits for comfort; IIRC that was dealt with.