[gambit-list] What are your experiences of Termite?

David McClain dbm at asyrmatos.com
Tue Apr 29 20:10:17 EDT 2008


Hi,

While not a production use of Termite, my recent reading of the  
sources led me to write our Butterfly system in Common Lisp. My  
initial attempts at using Termite let to this, as its performance  
seemed sporadic (more often failing than succeeding -- can't be sure  
why). But it became increasingly clear that in order to track down the  
difficulty, I would have to delve deeper into the threading mechanism  
of Gambit. I'd love to do that someday, but not now.

Butterfly takes a similar approach to Termite, offering both local and  
remote spawning of tasks across the network. In the case of both  
Butterfly and Termite, my own opinion is that we have a Mutex /  
Locking mechanism that serves perfectly well for simple thread  
coordination needs. Anything requiring more than one lock should  
probably be placed into a spawned server task. Erlang carries this to  
extremes, inserting even the most trivial things into autonomous  
threads. No doubt that helps its robustness, but we have more  
expensive thread switching mechanisms than Erlang, and it just seems  
like overkill. Your opinions could differ on this...

Our Butterfly will be used to control an interconnected series of  
millimeter-wave transceivers carrying data at rates 10-40 Gbps for  
wireless "ubiquitous computing".

Dr. David McClain
Sr. VP, Embedded Systems
Asyrmatos Inc.
Boston & Tucson
phone: 520-529-2437
cell: 520-390-3995
web: www.asyrmatos.com
email: dbm at asyrmatos.com





On Apr 29, 2008, at 4:58 PM, Marc Feeley wrote:

> On 29-Apr-08, at 2:13 PM, Mikael More wrote:
>
>> Hi!
>>
>> I'm interested in hearing what uses you and others have had of
>> termite, in production as well as experimentally. What is your
>> general experience? Is it mature for production use? If not, then
>> what needs to be improved? If so, what are the areas that would
>> benefit from further development?
>>
>> By what reasons would you or would you not go with Erlang, or any
>> other environment, to fill the same purposes? If any other
>> environment, then what environment?
>
> Interesting question!  I'm not aware of "production use" of Termite
> but if someone knows please speak up!
>
> I would like to ask you a question... what are you trying to do with
> Termite or Erlang, and why do you have a specific interest in Termite?
>
> One of the nice things about Gambit is that it can be used to
> implement Termite-like embedded languages relatively easily.  All the
> infrastructure is there (networking, object serialization, efficient
> threads).  If you want to see how, look at the example in examples/
> distr-comp particularly examples/distr-comp/dc.scm .  If that's not
> exactly what you want, go ahead and change it.  Try that with Erlang!
>
> Marc
>
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>




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