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by losvedir 3972 days ago
As a point of disclosure, and also to improve your credibility, you are the author of Quasar (actors and erlang-style processes on the JVM), are you not?

I'm just learning Elixir (and therefore erlang/BEAM somewhat) and one thing that's cool to me is that a piece of code that's taking too long to execute can be paused by the VM while it switches to another thing, which keeps the latency down. I think, like, each process has some number of "ticks" or something before it switches away.

Can erlang on the JVM do that?

Edit: Also, the other thing that majorly attracts me to Elixir/Erlang is OTP (applications, genservers, supervision trees with restart strategies, etc). Are there any plans to port those libraries/philosophy into Quasar?

1 comments

Yes, I am Quasar's main author, but note that I'm not advocating Quasar. I'm advocating Erlang, only on the JVM. And yes, Quasar has all those features, too, but an Erlang implementation on the JVM would use the Erlang implementation, not Quasar's Java implementation.

> Can erlang on the JVM do that?

Of course it can! Just like BEAM does it. (In fact, Quasar used to do that, too. We took out that feature because Quasar also gives you access to kernel threads, and processes that take to long can just be moved to kernel threads, which does this kind of preemption better, anyway. But an Erlang implementation on the JVM can behave just as Erlang does on BEAM).