< Features
Erlang/OTP R14
Summary
Update Erlang to the upstream R14 release.
Owners
- Names: Peter Lemenkov
- email: lemenkov@gmail.com
Current status
- Targeted release: Fedora 14
- Last updated: 2010-06-17
- Percentage of completion: 0%
Detailed Description
Erlang is a general-purpose concurrent programming language and runtime system. The sequential subset of Erlang is a functional language, with strict evaluation, single assignment, and dynamic typing. For concurrency it follows the Actor model. It was designed by Ericsson to support distributed, fault-tolerant, soft-real-time, non-stop applications. The first version was developed by Joe Armstrong in 1986. It supports hot swapping, thus code can be changed without stopping a system. Erlang was originally a proprietary language within Ericsson, but was released as open source in 1998.
While threads are considered a complicated and error-prone topic in most languages, Erlang provides language-level features for creating and managing processes with the aim of simplifying concurrent programming. Though all concurrency is explicit in Erlang, processes communicate using message passing instead of shared variables, which removes the need for locks.
The above text was taken from en:wikipedia:erlang
The status of Erlang and related packages in Fedora/EPEL is shown at Erlang SIG page.
Benefit to Fedora
Some notable improvements were made in this version. Among them are:
- Create binary terms with user defined memory management
- Receive statements are now specially optimized so that it will execute in constant time regardless of the number of messages in the receive queue for the process. All gen_server users (read, those who use
ejabberd - Users can override the auto-imported BIFs with their own realizations.
- Lots of other issues.
See full list for the details:
http://erlang.org/download/otp_src_R14A.readme
Fedora will be the first release-based distro with this new Erlang release, which encourages other Erlang developers and enthusiasts to give Fedora a try.
Also, with this feature, we will prove again that Fedora is a bleeding edge distribution.
Scope
TBD
How To Test
TBD
Contingency Plan
TBD
Release Notes
TBD