Re: [Chicken-users] anyone have a Playstation 3 ?

[Joerg F. Wittenberger]

> On Dec 25, 2006, at 10:10 PM, John Cowan wrote:
> 
> > Shawn Rutledge scripsit:
> >
> >> What other kinds of constructs can you imagine in Scheme for
> >> parallel
> >> execution, which would work better than threads?
> >
> > Communicating sequential processes (CSP) would be the obvious  
> > candidate.
> 
> All the pieces for a Chicken Termite are in place:
> 
> match-action egg
> mailbox egg (w/ timeout & cursor)
> Thomas Chust's rpc egg
> logging egg
> remote-launch egg

Even more: www.askemos.org has a slightly out of date chicken
tarball.  That one already served non-mutating requests before.

Background:
- we plan to go multi plattform anyway, but it takes time
- the chicken based dev version is stalled for performance reasons (at
  chicken version 0.something)
- Askemos/BALL is slightly more advanced at the application level
  (e.g. we don't ask in the manual to stay away from side effects,
   we avoid them in the interpreter);
  otherwise it's highly simillar
- it doesn't have message matching (at application level) since it's
  are completely unclear how this could interfer with the
  synchronisation protocol
- it has a byzantine sync protocol, there is global shared state
  (sort of "software transactional memory") over a quorum of hosts
  (the quorum is a per object property)
- the shared state is beyond the exclusive control of individual
  machines (required for tamper proof processes like electronic
  contracts, where Askemos is currently the only know option which
  actually works)
- porting requires mostly pulling eggs (is there something like
  libmagic and iconv?), convert FFI and some C in parsing and
  serialising
- we would have done it long ago, we just don't have the time.  Money
  will probably bring us even a Java version before the chicken port
  even though the Java port will be much more than a few weeks.