Edit: looks as if Erlang does indeed have its own, separate definition for lightweight process. See the disambiguation page on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-weight_process. How very poor of whoever started misusing an existing concurrency term to refer to something else - as if discussing these matters isn't already difficult enough.
Could someone familiar with Erlang please clarify:
"To understand why this is misleading, we need to go over some background information. Erlang popularized the concept of lightweight processes (Actors) and provides a runtime that beautifully abstracts the concurrency details away from the programmer. You can spawn as many Erlang processes as you need and focus on the code that functionally declares their communication. Behind the scenes, the VM launches enough kernel threads to match your system (usually one per CPU) "
In common Unix tools like 'ps' and 'top' the term 'Lightweight Process' is used as a synonym for OS thread, eg, the LWP column in 'ps -eLf' shows the thread ID.
In this article, LWPs seem to be different from threads? Is this correct? If they're not threads, what are they?
Could someone familiar with Erlang please clarify:
"To understand why this is misleading, we need to go over some background information. Erlang popularized the concept of lightweight processes (Actors) and provides a runtime that beautifully abstracts the concurrency details away from the programmer. You can spawn as many Erlang processes as you need and focus on the code that functionally declares their communication. Behind the scenes, the VM launches enough kernel threads to match your system (usually one per CPU) "
In common Unix tools like 'ps' and 'top' the term 'Lightweight Process' is used as a synonym for OS thread, eg, the LWP column in 'ps -eLf' shows the thread ID.
In this article, LWPs seem to be different from threads? Is this correct? If they're not threads, what are they?