Hello! I'm Ben, a software engineer who's fond of the Gleam programming language interested in learning OTP.
If you haven't heard:
- Gleam is a programming language that is statically typed, has great tooling, and an even better community.
- Gleam can compile to Erlang or JavaScript, depending on your needs. Because the concurrency models of these languages are fundamentally different, concurrency is handled at the library level.
- Erlang is sorta famous for its concurrency model, as well as it's standard framework for building concurrent applications: OTP. (Note: This isn't research stuff, Erlang is extremely battle tested. It runs a lot of places, and it was estimated in 2019 that "... 90% of all internet traffic (was) going through routers and switches controlled by Erlang." source)
- Gleam has a package for using the OTP framework, called
gleam_otp. It also has a package for more fundamental Erlang specific concepts,gleam_erlang.
I want to use these to build bad ass fault tolerant concurrent software!! But first, I need to learn OTP, which means I'll be learning with resources written in Erlang and Elixir (neither of which are languages I'm overly experienced with if I'm honest).
While I go on this journey, I'm going to do my damndest to translate the things I learn to Gleam, and record them here, so that in the future this repo might serve as the base for learning OTP with Gleam.
This resource presumes ALOT of prerequisite knowledge in it's users.
- You kinda know what Erlang concurrency and OTP is about/why it's good. If you've yet to drink the Kool-aid, allow me to provide some: The Soul of Erlang and Elixir talk
- You are familiar w/Gleam syntax. Gleam has a very small set of language features that all work well together. It takes the idea of having only one way to do something pretty seriously, and as such is really quick to learn. If you have never seen Gleam, try out the interactive tour, or follow the Syllabus on Exercism.
Each section is broken into it's own module (a top level file named <module_name>.gleam, and optionally a folder named <module_name> containing files for submodules). You can read them in the order you like, but I recommend
- concurrency_primitives
- tasks
- actors
- supervisors
All the code in this project is runnable, just run gleam run -m <module_name>. Feel free to clone the repo
and tinker with the code!