Archive for May 2011
Introduction to Erlang : Message Passing
May 26, 2011 | 
Author Message Passing
The communication model (among processes) in Erlang is message passing. No much need to be said about this. Erlang processes share no memory. The way that processes communicate is via (asynchronous) message passing. Every process (even the shell) holds a mailbox queue where incoming messages are placed until received by the process. Message passing is asynchronous because the sending process does not block on send. On the other hand, receiving a message in Erlang is a blocking operation.
Characteristics
In this subsection I will describe some of the characteristics of message passing in Erlang.
Asynchronous
As I already mentioned, message passing in Erlang is a non-blocking operation.
Data Copy
The message’s data are copied from the sending process to the receiver’s message queue, so the receiver gets a fresh copy of the data.
Ordering
Erlang runtime guarantees that if two messages are sent from node A to node B and both are delivered, then the ordering of these messages is kept (causal ordering).
Successful Send
The send operation always succeeds (even if the target is a non-existing process) and evaluates to the data sent. An exception is when trying to send data to a non-existing registered process.
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Posted in Erlang, Erlang Series, Programming | 
Tags: concurrency, erlang, message passing, series | 
1 Comment »
Introduction to Erlang : Concurrency (Processes)
Concurrency
Concurrency is defined as “the temporal property of two things happening at the same time” (according to WordNet). In Computer Science, the definition is “concurrency is a property of systems in which several computations are executing simultaneously, and potentially interacting with each other. The computations may be executing on multiple cores in the same chip, preemptively time-shared threads on the same processor, or executed on physically separated processors.” (according to Wikipedia).
In practise, if two, or more, tasks are concurrent, then they can run in parallel. This implies that there are no data dependencies among them. For example, the following tasks
- unlock the car (the car was locked)
- start the engine of the car (the engine was off)
- drive the car
are non-concurrent since they have dependencies. One cannot start the engine of the car without first entering the car and she cannot drive it without first starting the engine. These tasks have to be executed sequentially (with a predefined order) no matter if more than one person (processing unit) help. On the other hand
- doing the laundry
- washing the dishes
- go for shopping
can be potentially run in parallel. For example, three different family members can handle one task each. Moreover, if only one person has to do all the tasks, she can decide to perform them in any order she decides since there are no dependencies among them.
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Windows 7 “Advertisment” : Surf the web or surf Hawaii
I haven’t laughed that much for a long time!
Microsoft, in an effort to convince the users to buy a PC (running Windows 7) over a Mac, launched the following advertisement where it compares several Macs with Windows 7 based PCs.
In principal, I agree with the concept; why paying so much money for a Mac? But:
- Surf the web or surf Hawaii??? Using a Windows PC, aren’t you supposed to be able to surf the web also :-D? Maybe say “Surf the web, surf Hawaii, or both”!
- They could use PCs with the same (or more similar) CPU with the respective Mac in order to be more convincing..
Anyway, Microsoft is fun.. and desperate (??). Do the math.