[Haskell-cafe] Erlang VM in Haskell

[Neil Bartlett]

Joel,

This sounds like an extremely interesting (but very ambitious!)
project, which I would like to get involved with if I have the time.

However, wouldn't it be rather difficult, given that there doesn't
seem to be a publicly available specification for the Erlang VM or the
BEAM file format -- according to this email thread on the
erlang-questions list:

http://www.nabble.com/VM---BEAM-Specs-t4215515.html

Perhaps it would be interesting to look at a slightly more constrained
problem: can Erlang's message passing model (including distributed
messaging across a network) and process monitoring facilities be
replicated in Haskell? In other words, can we build OTP in Haskell?

Regards,
Neil



On 8/16/07, Joel Reymont <joelr1 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Folks,
>
> I would like to write an Erlang VM in Haskell. I first thought of
> OCaml but Haskell has SMP and lazy evaluation may come in handy.
> Plus, I'll need help in this project like in no other and support
> from the Haskell community has always been outstanding.
>
> I'm doing this to learn more about the Erlang internals and to
> acquire some skills in the process. I'm also hoping to be at least as
> fast as the existing Erlang VM (written in C) and to be able to
> extend the VM in a functional language.
>
> With C you can implement a threaded VM using GCC labels or switch-
> style [1]. What is the most efficient approach in Haskell?
>
> I'm thinking using CPS and building up a chain of closures. Would
> this work well? Any other suggestions?
>
> The Haskell repo for the initial HEM (Haskell Erlang Machine) is at
> http://darcs.haskell.org/hem. A much improved HAW implementation will
> follow in the not so near future.
>
>         Thanks, Joel
>
> [1] http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/forth/threaded-code.html
>
> --
> http://wagerlabs.com
>
>
>
>
>
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