I am kind of between projects right now so I am wondering what I should do next. I really like functional programming, and in particular languages like Erlang, Haskell and F#. So I started to wonder if I should make an Erlang compiler for the .NET runtime.
I like Erlang for a number of reasons: It is simple, it is a functional programming language, the language is designed around the actor-model for interprocess (Erlang processes that is) communication, a system written in Erlang is very robust, and creating computing clusters and high-availability servers is almost too easy.
So if I am about to start making an implementation of Erlang for the .NET platform there are a few obstacles and questions that needs to be addressed first:
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I recently discovered this webcast called “Erlang – software for a concurrent world” by Joe Armstrong. It is recorded at a JAOO conference. Yes, I wrote “a”… I can’t find any info on which one it is but i strongly suspect it is from either London, Sydney or Brisbane in 2008.
Anyway, the webcast is about an hour long, and is really interesting.
Remember to check out Joe Armstrongs blog if you are interested in Erlang and functional programming.
After weeks of writing, rewriting and testing the code for the Message Passing API (MPAPI) it is finally finished.
MPAPI is a framework that enables programmers to write concurrent, parallel and/or distributed software systems – in essence building cluster computers. I started writing it for a couple of reasons:
- My research into genetic programming (GP) was stalling a bit due to limited computing resources. Since I have a few computers around the house I wanted to enlist them in the huge computations that are necessary in GP, and I wanted to write a framework for building such distributed systems.
- For years I have written multithreaded (concurrent, parallel) software using the normal constructs for that in C++, Java and C#. Time and again I have debugged such applications, and I have yet to see a multithreaded program that is bugfree. It is simply too complex to write such applications using the normal synchronization mechanisms in languages with shared state concurrency. After writing a bit of Erlang code I was profoundly pleased with the way that language handles concurrency, and the ideas I have learned from that language has been incorporated into MPAPI. (more…)