Re: Is Lua the next big thing?

[roberto@... (Roberto Ierusalimschy)]

> Complete isolated interpreters are a problem of its own and simply
> kills most of the advances of threading at all.

Erlang does not support shared memory; its processes communicate via
messages. That does not seem to kill its "threading power". (Erlang
has been used quite successfuly in several light real-time industrial
applications with high level of parallelism.)


> If i have to serialize all data, send it as a byte stream into another
> interpreter and deserialize there, i can also live with serparate
> processes. I'm not sure if you can migrate a complete object structure
> from one interpreter instance to another in LUA (i don't believe you
> can).

When we use threads without shared memory, frequently we have to think
differently from the way we think with shared memory. For instance,
instead of sending data all around (through serialized streams), it is
common to have one process for each data (an object? an abstract data
type?), so that what flows around are "messages" (in the OO sense) to
manipulate that data. You never migrate a complete object structure
from one interpreter instance to another. You simply send a process
reference from one instance to another.

-- Roberto