Current Erlang has two kinds of funs. An “external” fun, Module:Name/Arity, is just a name and can be used freely. A “local” fun contains code that is bound to the module it was defined in. This means that you cannot save internal funs in data bases or send them to remote systems and expect them to work.
I propose a “portable fun”, which is a syntactically restricted kind of fun. The restriction ensures that a programmer knows (and the run time can discover) exactly what modules are/will be required. These funs can be safely sent to remote nodes, and can safely be stored in data bases, retrieved at a later time, and executed. Nor need a process holding a reference to such a fun be killed when the module it came from is unloaded.
A new way of implementing these funs is required for best speed, so this is quite a large change. However, a prototype that interpreted portable functions would be possible.
Currently, Erlang has
fun_expr -> 'fun' fun_clauses 'end' : ...
We add
fun_expr -> 'fun' '!' fun_clauses 'end' : ...
and make the following restrictions:
The intent of these restrictions is to ensure that every call is to a built in function, a known export of a known module, or to some kind of fun received as a parameter.
The built-in function erlang:fun_info/1 is extended in the following ways:
The built-in function erlang:fun_info/2 is extended similarly. An additional key ‘source’ is provided for this function.
The built-in functions-and-guard-predicates erlang:is_function(Term) and erlang:is_function(Term, Arity) accept portable funs as well as external and local ones.
Two new built-in functions-and-guard-predicates erlang:is_portable_function(Term) and erlang:is_portable_function(Term, Arity) are provided, which recognise ‘portable’ and ‘external’ functions.
(This proposal will definitely need to be revised to make the names clearer.)
Imagine that you have an Erlang node reporting events to clients on other nodes. Clients wish to receive only a few of the events. One approach is for the reporter to send all events to all clients and let the clients do the filtering. A better approach lets the clients tell the reporter which events they want, and for it to send just the interesting events. But how do the clients tell the reporter which events they are interested in?
One approach is to simply have a fixed set of event classes. That is too coarse.
Another approach would be to define an event description language, perhaps based in some way on match specifications. That is better, but there is currently no way to compile match specifications (that’s another thing this is for!) so matching is slow, and it is still limited; the reporter might want to provide summary functions that the filters can use.
Another approach would be to send a fun, which is really the obvious way to do it. Unfortunately, this currently will not work, and there are reasons why it shouldn’t. (For example, the body of a local function may have been subject to inline expansion of functions whose definitions on the receiving node are different.)
Another approach would be to send an entire module as a binary. This gets a bit heavyweight. It also creates a problem of managing possibly large numbers of modules in the reporter. It is also insecure unless the reporter does a lot of work to verify the code for safety. Long term, it will also create version skew problems if the client and reporter are not using exactly the same BEAM (or other VM).
For another example, consider storing functions in a data base. Since a local fun is tied to a specific version of a specific module, if you save a function one month, upgrade your system, and restore the module next month, you cannot expect it to work. This means that, for example, you cannot store a binary together with a function that knows how to decode it.
For another example, consider something like a data base that dynamically receive matchspecs (or something like matchspecs) and wishes to apply such a thing to millions of records. It is easy enough to transform a matchspec to Erlang code, and even to compile the result, but now you have a module to manage, not a simple thing that can be cleaned up by a garbage collector.
Basically, the aim of this proposal is to move Erlang one step further along the “functions are data” functional programming way.
However, it is necessary to do this in such a way that a process receiving a portable fun does not have to place total trust in the source. The receiver must be able to inspect a portable fun as well as just call it.
It would not be a good idea to just add the portability restrictions on top of existing fun syntax. That would break most programs that use funs.
Perhaps the obvious thing would be to use #fun…end, as the sharp seems to be Erlang’s “oops, we didn’t think of that in the Good Old Days” marker, much as it is in Common Lisp. However, we want that notation for anonymous abstract patterns, and in any case, there is nothing iconic about the sharp in this context.
The bang is used to suggest that this is a kind of fun that you might want to send, which indeed it is. As for where it is placed, the bang is to be thought of as post-modifying the ‘fun’ keyword, not as pre-modifying the argument list, so that
fun!({a,X}) -> ...
;({b,Y}) -> ...
end
does not have a repeated bang.
What do you send when you send a portable fun?
If it is native code, you can’t send a fun from a SPARC to a Mac. If it is BEAM code, you can’t send a fun to another system unless it has exactly the same version of BEAM. In either case, you have made life extremely hard for a wary receiver that wants to inspect the code. If it is the source code, then
Accordingly, the binary format for a portable fun would include the source tree, possibly compressed as in Kistler’s Juice. The native representation would include a pointer to a block of BEAM code and optionally a pointer to a block of native code, but these would be filled in on first call.
The possibility of interpretation means that there is a cheap way to implement a prototype of this EEP: always interpret. This too argues against any change to existing funs; we don’t want to slow them down.
“fun!” is currently a syntax error, so no existing code can be affected by that.
As I read the documentation for erlang:fun_info/[1,2], programmers should always have treated these functions as open-ended. Nothing promised by the existing manual is removed or altered, only new values provided.
Any existing program that called erlang:is_portable_function/[1,2] didn’t work anyway, there being no such functions. If a module defined is_portable_function/1 or /2, it would not have been allowed in a guard, but would have been allowed elsewhere; such a module could be affected. If the compiler discovers a definition of either function in a module, it should print a warning message, and use only the module’s version.
None.
Long term, this needs at least two things:
a fun representation that holds instructions in a binary that is not part of any module, not unlike the classic Interlisp-D implementation, so that such funs can be individually garbage collected. This is desirable anyway.
a compilation strategy for comprehensions that, like the classic Pop-2 system, generates in-line loops instead of calls to out-of-line auxiliary functions. This is desirable anyway; it should be noticeably faster.
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