From: David Masover <ninja@...>
Date: 2008-07-30T01:00:26+09:00
Subject: Re: Concurrent Ruby?

On Tuesday 29 July 2008 06:01:10 Florian Gilcher wrote:
> 
> On Jul 29, 2008, at 8:55 AM, David Masover wrote:
> 
> > a long mail
> 
> Nice writeup.

Thanks!

> You forgot one thing about Erlang, though: It is 
> (mostly) sideeffect-free while
> object orientated languages always rely on sideeffects.

If I understand it right, side effects in Erlang simply take a different form. 
Nothing's stopping me from sending random, spurious messages in the middle of 
a supposedly-innocuous function.

I did talk about data not being mutable, which provides both a semantic 
(lock-free) and a technical advantage (raw speed).

I'm trying to figure out how to at least partly duplicate the semantic 
advantage in Ruby, but it's not easy -- I'm stuck either #freeze-ing 
everything, or wrapping every message in an actor of its own, and both 
approaches seem more obnoxious and error-prone than forcing the developer to 
deal with it.