Gleam OTP

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A Gleam library for building fault tolerant multi-core programs using the actor model. It is compatible with Erlang’s OTP framework.

Gleam’s actor system is built with a few primary goals:

This library documents its abstractions and functionality, but you may also wish to read the documentation or other material on Erlang’s OTP framework to get a fuller understanding of OTP, the problems it solves, and and the motivations for its design.

Not all Erlang/OTP functionality is included in this library. Some is not possible to represent in a type safe way, so it is not included. Other features are still in development, such as further process supervision strategies.

Usage

Add this library to your Gleam project.

gleam add gleam_otp

Actor hierarchy

This library provides several different types of actor that can be used in Gleam programs.

Process

The process is the lowest level building block of OTP, all other actors are built on top of processes either directly or indirectly. Typically this abstraction would not be used very often in Gleam applications, favour other actor types that provide more functionality.

Gleam’s process module is defined in the gleam_erlang library.

Actor

The actor is the most commonly used process type in Gleam and serves as a good building block for other abstractions. Like Erlang’s gen_server it handles OTP’s system messages automatically to enable OTP’s debugging and tracing functionality.

Documentation

Task

A task is a kind of process that performs a single task and then shuts down. Commonly tasks are used to convert sequential code into concurrent code by performing computation in another process.

Supervisor

Supervisors is a process that starts and then supervises a group of processes, restarting them if they crash. Supervisors can start other supervisors, resulting in a hierarchical process structure called a supervision tree, providing fault tolerance to a Gleam application.

Limitations and known issues

This library does not currently replicate all of the Erlang/OTP functionality. Some limitations include:

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