The Erlang Compiler

-
From Programming in the 21st Century, a quick overview of how the Erlang compiler works.  Takes me back to  Dragon Book days…
Erlang is a complex system, and I can't do its inner workings justice in a short article, but I wanted to give some insight into what goes on when a module is compiled and loaded. As with most compilers, the first step is to convert the textual source to an abstract syntax tree, but that's unremarkable. What is interesting is that the code goes through three major representations, and you can look at each of them. (more...)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Erlang, Binaries, and Garbage Collection (Sigh)

-
Image
The nice thing about garbage-collection is that it is makes memory management absolutely transparent to you Of course, the above is true right up to the point when it stops being transparent, at which point it does a phase change from nice to clusterf**k of biblical proportions .  There are entire posts, books, and suicide notes that have been written about this, and I have no great desire to add to them, save with the minor comment that paranoia about garbage-collection is still justified , albeit only in the edge-cases for most people. That said, I'll give you that Erlang GC is in many ways much, much better positioned in this regard than, oh, Java, but it still rears up and bites you in the butt when you least expect it. ( More information about Erlang's GC vis-a-vis Java here , and Jesper's truly excellent description of Erlang's GC here ).  A story from the past should serve to illustrate this. Once upon a time, in a magical land far far away - well, Her...
Read more

Cannonball Tree!

-
Image
Spotted this one just outside the Ravindra Kalakshetra in Bangalore .  Its called the Cannonball Tree , but is - technically (i.e., in Latin, if thats your metier) - Couroupita Guianensis , or ನಾಗಲಿಂಗ ಪುಷ್ಪಾ  in Kannada. The fruits look like Cannonballs (well, d-uh), and the flowers are really quite amazing, and pretty ludicrously distinctive...
Read more