Friday, September 26, 2008

Infinite Possibilities : Classes and Objects on top of Erlang Processes

From Toni Arceiri's blog on Reia ..

"Objects are able to communicate with only with messages. They hold their own state, which can only be accessed by other objects via messages."

"Reia’s objects function as separate Erlang processes. This mean every object is concurrent and runs simultaneously, provided it has something to do."

"More than that, Reia objects are gen_servers. Erlang’s gen_servers are a simultaneously lauded and malaigned construct of Erlang’s OTP framework."

Reia is a Python/Ruby like scripting language targetted for the Erlang Virtual Machine (BEAM). I had blogged on its release some time back. Now it looks more interesting with the object semantics on top of Erlang processes.

Really dying out to see how it compares to Scala actors once we have Scala-OTP on board ..

2 comments:

Michael Campbell said...

I'm not sure what this says about ME, but this and SCALA-OTP are the most exciting things in my little programming worldview in a long, long time.

Unknown said...

This is an extremely interesting development. It looks like Reia may deliver the ideal OOP that Alan Kay envisioned originally with Smalltalk. Nice work Tony and tgank you for the report Debasish :)