Re: Concurrency in Lua / accessing the Erlang website...

[Robert Raschke <rrlua@...>]

Lisa Parratt wrote:
> Joseph Stewart wrote:
>>     When I have access to the Erlang site, I may have more to offer, but
>>     in the meantime, does anyone want to weigh in on this as a
>>     possibility in the Lua arena (ErLua)?
> 
> I may be vaguely confused, but how is this any different from running a 
> number of independent Lua VMs in different threads, using message queues 
> for IPC?

In Erlang, processes are not threads, neither are they OS processes.
They are extremely lightweight.  In a typical Erlang appllication, you
end up creating as many processes as are needed, usually in the
thousands (but that obviously depends on your application).  I think
there have been tests to see how the systems scales when you get into
the territory of hundreds of thousands of processes and it was very
positive (I would need to hunt for references).  There's a web server
(yaws) written in Erlang that compares very favourably against Apache.

I have wanted to create a binding between Erlang and Lua for a while
now, but have never had enough time.  It would be fabulous to use
Erlang's massive support for distributed, fault tolerant programming
to manage the execution small Lua scripts.

I believe there was a power outage that took down the machines hosting
www.erlang.org . Not sure when it'll be back up.

Robby