[erlang-questions] Nested finite state machines - Existing Implementations?

[Ulf Wiger]

Hi Ken,

I don't think nested state machines are used much in the erlang world, 
since it's generally considered detrimental to "complify" the FSM running
in a single process.

OTOH, sometimes, you need to, in order to implement some behaviour.
One of the examples I've used in presentations was when implementing
a Diameter stack (rfc3588). It (arbitrarily) combines different FSMs into
a single thread, and this caused me to refactor the spec into multiple
cooperating FSMs (using plain_fsm). The price you pay is that it becomes
hard  to check that your code actually matches the spec - even though it
became easier to see that the code did what I think was the intention…

At AXD301 (a long, long time ago, it seems), we had the need for at least
two levels of nesting, for a call-control FSM and a transport FSM - one for 
each call leg. We did this by making the call-control FSM an active process,
a la plain_fsm, and implementing the transport FSMs as gen_fsm-style 
callbacks (but dispatched from within the CC FSM). We went through many
iterations, so it's quite likely that we eventually departed from this model
and implemented all FSMs as separate processes.

And going for as many processes as the problem called for was one of the
driving forces behind gproc, which can serve as a index for locating the FSM
you need (based on ordered_set semantics and supporting QLC, you should
be able to efficiently select even a subset of multiple FSMs).

http://github.com/esl/gproc 

In my presentation, "Death by Accidental Complexity", I use a parameterised
bare-bones event loop for FSM programming, which I also extend with a 
"select vector" to support a form of selective receive in the FSM callbacks.

Most of these things, and more (e.g. a link to ExAT) can be found in the following
thread:

http://forum.trapexit.org/viewtopic.php?p=15811&sid=197b687b90d851e0b7ffdaa4f1465f8f

If memory serves, Joel Reymont solved the problem to his own satisfaction in 
the poker server, but my quick late-night googling failed to reveal a good link.

Joel?

BR,
Ulf W


On 22 Mar 2011, at 04:47, Ken Robinson wrote:

> Hi All,
> I have a standard which I'm implementing which calls for nested state
> machines which have push and pop states and entry and exit actions.
> I'm having difficulty using gen_fsm to do this. I've been looking at
> plain_fsm by Ulf Wiger which looks promising. Before I reinvent the
> wheel, is there any existing fully fledged nested state machines out
> there?
> 
> -- 
> regards,
> Ken Robinson
> Mob +61438681120
> Home +61738523767
> 
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Ulf Wiger, CTO, Erlang Solutions, Ltd.
http://erlang-solutions.com