[erlang-questions] Re: Process Dictionary vs Proplist in Web Frameworks

[Geoff Cant]

Steve Davis <steven.charles.davis@REDACTED> writes:

> On Oct 29, 6:39 am, Geoff Cant <n...@REDACTED> wrote:
>
>> Good erlang code does not use the process dictionary.
>
> Note that both gen_server and wx libraries make use of the PD.
>

I think you'll find that gen_server makes almost no use of the process
dictionary. The gen_server code itself makes only one reference to the
process dictionary - to pass the pid of the parent process between the
proc_lib:init stage and the gen_server:enter_loop stage through
arbitrary intervening user code.

proc_lib only uses the process dictionary to store the initial_call and
parent pids of the process. The initial_call is only used in exit reports
and the ancestor/parent pid information is used mainly in exit reports,
though also occasionally by appmon to draw the process ancestry tree and
httpc_manager to implement the is_inets_manager() function.

I don't think the minimal use of the process dictionary in either of
these cases undermines the case that good erlang code does not use the
process dictionary. Occasionally you might have to, to work around
historic code that you can't refactor for backwards compatibility
reasons, or for some particular debugging cases. But that doesn't fall
into my definition of good - just the best possible given the
constraints. New erlang code should strive to avoid the process
dictionary if at all possible.


In the case of 'wx', the process dictionary is used to pass around a
#wx_env{} structure - I'm not quite sure why this wasn't just a
parameter instead. Maybe there's something else (like port ownership?)
that makes tying the structure to the process in the process dict make
sense? I'm kinda curious about this one - if there's a good argument to
be made for using the process dictionary, I'll amend or retract my
anti-process-dictionary bigotry :) 

Cheers,
-- 
Geoff Cant