[erlang-questions] What I dislike about Erlang

[Per Melin]

On Aug 31, 2012, at 20:57 , Evan Miller wrote:

> A few more comments specific to TinyMQ:
> 
> On Fri, Aug 31, 2012 at 1:20 AM, Richard O'Keefe <ok@REDACTED> wrote:
>>  Another documentation failure is that we fail to document what
>>  is not there.  In TinyMQ, a channel automatically comes into
>>  existence when you try to use it.  Perhaps as a consequence of
>>  this, there is no way to shut a channel down.  In TinyMQ, old
>>  messages are not removed from a channel when they expire, but
>>  the next time someone does a 'subscribe' (waves hands) or a 'poll'
>>  or a 'push' *after* they expire.  So if processes stop sending
>>  and requesting messages to some channel, the last few messages,
>>  no matter how large, may hang around forever.  I'm sure there
>>  is a reason, but because it's a reason for something *not* being
>>  there, there's no obvious place to hang the comment, and there
>>  isn't one.  (Except for the dead 'expire' clause mentioned above.)
>> 
>> IT'S HARD TO SPOT SALIENT DETAIL IN A SEA OF GLUE CODE.
> 
> This probably proves your point, but just to be clear old messages
> will only "hang around forever" if 1. there are no new messages on a
> channel and 2. the channel continues to receive requests. If there is
> no activity on a channel for max_age, the gen_server timeout is
> invoked here:
> 
> https://github.com/evanmiller/tinymq/blob/master/src/tinymq_channel_controller.erl#L76

There must be a bug there. You only specify a timeout in the return of init, but that does not persist beyond the first message received. I can't see how that timeout would ever be invoked.


> That calls "expire" (erasing the reference to the channel) and then
> exits the supervisor (eliminating the channel and all of its
> messages).

If you by that mean that it kills the supervisor, it does not. It kills itself, with the supervisor pid as its exit message.

Either way, why do you create a new supervisor for each channel, and why do you create it outside the supervisor tree (i.e from a gen_server and not another supervisor)? What purpose does it serve?