Distributed and concurrent Squeak

Patrick Logan patrickl at servio.gemstone.com
Tue Oct 13 22:22:00 UTC 1998


    You should also look at Kali Scheme.  One of the interesting
    points of distribution is when and how much to share.  Kali takes
    an interesting approach.

I agree with Ken that Kali Scheme is a neat system. One of the issues
for a "little pain, big gain" solution to distributed/concurrent
Squeak will be whether objects always be passed by value or sometimes
by reference. Passing by value will be less painful (no distributed
GC) as long as they are small and/or other assumptions can be made.

Objects in Erlang are immutable, messages are kept small on purpose,
and nodes maitain "atom tables" in order to "abbreviate" the passing
of the common atoms (so they support a non-collectable form of
reference).

Sun's Jini architecture has a solution for distrbuted GC too:
leases. All references have an agreed-upon expiration date so each
node can perform just local garbage collection with distributed
references being kept alive by an explicit lease.

-- 
Patrick Logan                 mailto:patrickl at gemstone.com
Voice 503-533-3365            Fax   503-629-8556
Gemstone Systems, Inc         http://www.gemstone.com

"I am not a Church numeral; I am a free variable!"





More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list