Re: Erlang Style Cocurrency in Lua

[Benjamin Tolputt <btolputt@...>]

Timothy Baldridge wrote:
> I spent some time last year learning Erlang, and I have to say, I love
> the way it works.  However, I find the syntax totally unusable for my
> everyday use.
>
> I have an idea for Lua after digging through its sources. I love Lua,
> it's fast, simple and brain-dead easy to extend.What I would like to
> do is add Erlang style co-currency and actor based programming models
> to Lua. Basically the idea would be to spawn a separate LuaState for
> each "process" (in the Erlang sense of the word). Then in the main
> loop of the interpreter, we could exit early after a certain number of
> OPS have been executed.
>
> >From here we can spawn n+1 OS threads where n is the number of CPUs.
> By cycling through the LuaStates we should be able to keep all the
> CPUs busy all the time.
>
> My idea is to add these extra LuaStates as "children" of the first
> state created. In this way all the existing C modules should/might
> continue to work. Granted if two processes call the same thread we may
> have issues, but hey, it's not a perfect world.
>
> Throw into this mix a simple ! operator so we can do:
> pid ! message
>
> And we would be on the road to having Erlang style co currency in Lua.
>
> Is anyone interested in working on this with me? I know C like the
> back of my hand, I could just use some feedback/backup in the codin
>   
I would suggest looking into "ConcurrentLua" which starts from the same
basis as you seem to be. Google is your friend here :)

-- 
Regards,

Benjamin Tolputt
Analyst Programmer

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