Programming Languages, Martials Arts and Computers. The Weblog of Chris Double.
2006-07-19
Trapexit, one of the best Erlang resource websites is back in action. The forum on trapexit mirrors the Erlang mailing list and has a much better search mechanism it's a great resource and I missed it while Trapexit was down. Announcement of Trapexit coming back is here.
2006-07-18
The Scala programming language has been getting a bit of attention on Lambda the Ultimate lately. One paper in particular interested me, covering the implementation of a lightweight concurrency model in Scala.
Scala compiles to JVM bytecode (and apparently there is a version that compiles to .NET as well). The paper describes implementing an Erlang style concurrency system within the JVM that doesn't use native threads. This allows large number of 'actors' to exist, communicating with each other. An interesting aspect of what they've done is how they've gone about mapping the actors to native threads so that long blocking operations can get their own thread as well as utilising threads to run some of the lightweight processes.
All of this is implemented as a library rather than extending the Scala language itself.
2006-07-05
CLPython is an implementation of the Python programming language in Common Lisp. From the page:
A large part of the Python language features is implemented by CLPython (basic data types, functions, classes, metaclasses, generators, closures, ...). Many recently introduced features are still missing (e.g. "y = yield x"); the intention is of course to add these features to CLPython.
(Link from Stephan Scholl's weblog).
2006-07-01
A post on the Erlang mailing points to a lightweight distribution of Erlang with package management facilities to enable installing extra functionality.
The first install is a 1.4MB file which expands to 3MB. This is compares favourably to a full Erlang installation of 35MB (for the windows download).
Functions are included to list, install, remove and upgrade packages.
2006-06-29
Ocsigen is a web framework written in OCaml.
In particular, some recent research papers have shown that functional programming works very well for this domain (use of continuations or closures, continuation passing style ...). Accordingly, Ocsigen considers each URL as a function taking arguments and producing a web page. Clicking on a link or a form triggers execution of this function.
Another significant issue addressed by Ocsigen is the generation of valid xhtml pages. The web relies on norms edicted by the W3 consortium, and the only means to ensure universal availability of information is to respect these standards. Today, very few web sites are fully standard compliant. Ocsigen uses an advanced type system that guarantees that your web site will be valid (or very close).
Link from Phil Wadlers blog.
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