[Haskell-cafe] Actors and message-passing a la Erlang

[Joseph Wayne Norton]

This may not be of direct interest to the Haskell community but I thought  
I'd share this information anyway.

If you are looking for a solution (in Erlang that runs on Erlang's virtual  
machine) to enforce an explicit contract between a client and a server,  
there is framework called UBF.  This framework is designed for providing  
rpc-like services based on a contract.  The contract is enforced  
dynamically at runtime (not at compile time).

The original implementation was made by Joe Armstrong  
(http://www.sics.se/~joe/ubf/site/home.html).  An updated implementation  
with new features is currently hosted on GitHub (www.github.com/norton).

thanks,

- Joe N.

On Tue, 27 Jul 2010 22:13:07 +0900, David Leimbach <leimy2k at gmail.com>  
wrote:

> On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 5:27 AM, Stefan Schmidt <
> stefanschmidt42 at googlemail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi Yves,
>>
>>
>>> You say that "With the help of this library it is possible to build
>>> Erlang-Style mailboxes", but how would you solve the issue of static  
>>> typing?
>>>
>>
>> this wasn't an issue for me because I wanted as much type checking as
>> possible. In many implementations, you have an implicit contract  
>> between the
>> sender and the receiver process. In this case, the contract is explicit  
>> and
>> the compiler can tell me if I'm trying to send or receive "wrong" data.
>>
>>
>
> I've found that I like Erlang's pattern matching for sorting through
> different kinds of data payloads, but that I prefer to use typed data
> channels per Limbo, Go, Plan 9's thread and messaging libraries etc.   
> I've
> often wanted an Erlang with static typing to get this capability.


-- 
norton at alum.mit.edu