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Monday, July 18, 2005

Termite: a Lisp for Distributed Computing

Update via email: Guillaume Germain expects to have a release of Termite in the next few weeks. End Update

Termite is a Lisp for distributed computing. (PDF paper and PDF presentation)

From the presentation...

In short: take Scheme, remove mutations, add isolated processes with mailboxes, add message sending and receiving operations and an addressing mechanism.
The bottom line is Termite is Erlang's distributed concurrency model ported to a dialect of Scheme that has been pared back to something like the sequential aspects of the Erlang language (chapters from Erlang book PDF).

Included in Termite are continuations that can support distributed process migration and macros. Continuations, macros, and closures allow Termite to be more amenable to discovering new abstractions than Erlang.

Termite is from the Gambit team at University of Montreal and runs on Gambit 4.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You might be interested to look at Askemos
(sf).
Askemos features a quite simillar, Erlang-style processing model. It is also based on a persistant Scheme without mutation. As a minor difference: Askemos uses serialised XML values where Termite communicates Scheme values.
The main difference: Askemos processes (called places over there) have no spacial properties (physical hosts), they are executed in byzantine synchronisation on a quorum of nodes. Thus it provides a tamper proof programming environment.

Anonymous said...

Who knows where to download XRumer 5.0 Palladium?
Help, please. All recommend this program to effectively advertise on the Internet, this is the best program!

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Portland, Oregon, United States
I'm usually writing from my favorite location on the planet, the pacific northwest of the u.s. I write for myself only and unless otherwise specified my posts here should not be taken as representing an official position of my employer. Contact me at my gee mail account, username patrickdlogan.