[erlang-questions] Scoped group leaders

[Yurii Rashkovskii]

Hi,

I had an idea to play with this long weekend and I want to share some
results and get some feedback.

Basically, I was wondering whether it will be feasible to extend the
concept of group leaders beyond I/O so that you can build your own
primitives around this construct of inherited group leaders. It seemed
to me that tasks like implicit configuration, security groups and such
can benefit from having a more generalized group leadership mechanism.

In the last two days I wrote a quick-n-dirty proof of concept
implementation (https://github.com/spawngrid/otp/tree/group_leader_scope),
it's pretty rough but seems to work. I also wrote an early draft of an
EEP for this feature
(https://github.com/spawngrid/eep/blob/scoped-group-leaders/eeps/eep-scoped-group-leaders.md).

The EEP has some examples, and you can play with that PoC
implementation (group_leader_scope branch). It's not ready for the
prime time, though — it lacks automated tests and the performance
implications have not yet been measured (although this should be fixed
soon). No optimizations were considered at this moment.

The EEP draft itself has not been sent to EEP editors as I plan to
elaborate on motivations and possibly add more examples.

Either way, please let me know if this is of any interest to anybody
and if you have any thoughts about it.

Have a nice weekend,
Yurii.