Concurrency and Message Passing in Erlang

In July 2011 I received an email asking if I would write an article about Erlang for the IEEE Computers in Science and Engineering (CiSE) magazine. The email said they had first invited Joe Armstrong but Joe had recommended me instead — how could I refuse a request like that? :)

It took awhile, but my resulting article “Concurrency and Message Passing in Erlang” is now published in the Nov/Dec 2012 issue of CiSE. Here’s the abstract:

Developers use the open source Erlang programming language in domains such as telecommunications, database systems, and the Web due to its superior support for concurrency and reliability. Erlang applications comprise numerous processes—lightweight user-space threads—that communicate via message passing. This article focuses on Erlang’s concurrency support and details an example 1D Poisson solver program.

Due to IEEE copyright rules I’m allowed to post only the final draft (PDF) sent to the magazine’s layout folks, but that’s OK since its text and figures are identical to the final published version. I haven’t yet received my hard copy of the magazine, but it looks like an interesting issue; it’s a special one covering concurrency in modern programming languages, and it also contains articles about Haskell and Clojure. The guest editors’ introduction explains the issue in more detail.

If you’re interested, you can purchase the full final article from the IEEE here. And now for some obligatory legalese: My article linked above is © 2012 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author’s copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.