[Haskell-cafe] Bringing Erlang to Haskell

[Joel Reymont]

Folks,

I love the Erlang multi-processing experience and think that a lot of  
the mistakes that I made could be avoided. What I want to have is

1) Processes, aka threads with single-slot in/out mailboxes
2) A facility to keep a list of such processes and send events to  
them using their process id
3) A socket reader/writer abstraction that communicates with the  
outside world using using its mailboxes

Probably some other things but I would start with the above. I also  
want to use STM for this.

One particular thing that bugs me is that I cannot really use TChan  
for thread mailboxes. I don't think I experienced this problem with  
Erlang but using a TChan with a logger thread quickly overwhelms the  
logger and fills the TChan and a lot (hundreds? thousands) of other  
threads are logging to it. Someone said it's because the scheduler  
would give ther other threads proportionally more attention.

I found single-slot mailboxes (TMVar) to work much better as they  
pace the overall message flow. Using them means that asynchronous  
messages cannot be implemented, though.

Please correct me if I'm wrong. I'll update my blog as I move forward.

	Thanks, Joel

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