The Next Mainstream Programming Language: A Game Developer's

[Sean Kelly]

eao197 wrote:
> On Thu, 19 Jul 2007 02:54:29 +0400, Sean Kelly <sean at f4.ca> wrote:
> 
>> Brad Roberts wrote:
>>>  Erlang is indeed a very interesting system if for no other reason 
>>> that it's fairly unique.  I wish I could find 3-6 months to really 
>>> get my hands dirty with it, but alas, that's behind another dozen or 
>>> so projects.  Anyone wanna be my lackey, I mean research assistant?  
>>> The pay would be crappy, the housing not free, and the hours sucky.. 
>>> but it'd be fun, honest!
>>
>> Now that I'm learning about Erlang I'm discovering that it seems to 
>> work a lot like how I wanted to approach concurrency in D, so I'm 
>> definitely going to try and find some time to play with it.
> 
> The Scala developers have tried to implement something similar to Erlang 
> as a Scala's library 'Actors' [1].
> Because of some Scala features (especially pattern matching and symbols 
> as method names) Scala code looks like Erlang.

All good points.  And I concede that it would be difficult to achieve 
the level of concurrency used in Erlang applications in an imperative 
language like D.  But I do believe that the basic style of programming 
could be used with reasonable results.  Processes wouldn't be quite as 
"throw-away" as in Erlang, which would have an impact on error handling 
and such, but the proper message-oriented design could do fairly well 
anyway.  CSP, for example, assumes a more heavy-weight process model. 
It doesn't span networks so well, but it at least shows that similar 
approaches to parallelism meet with reasonable results in imperative 
languages.

But my post was really about Erlang anyway :-)  It sounds very 
interesting and I may well end up wishing I had a project in which to 
use it.  I'd certainly rather layer Erlang atop D than atop C anyway.


Sean