2010/03/01

Had a talk on 4th Tokyo Erlang Workshop

(This post is a translation of my Japanese post)
I participated to 4th Tokyo Erlang Workshop in Aoyama Oracle Center Tokyo, Japan. I had a talk about Yatce in sessions and went to the party. The organizer was cooldaemon, who did a great contribution and prepare for the workshop and the party. All people there including me appreciated very much on his contribution. Also I appreciate Oracle Japan, Inc. for it's contribution of providing its great conference room and understanding on open-source communities.

The workshop:
Takeru Inoue's "(maybe) useful Algorithms for distributed storage" was first and the most difficult speech. He talked about 'Sinphonia', which took best paper in SOSP'07, overcoming the Amazon's famous Dynamo paper. This algorithm is very difficult but revolutionary because it shows a method that is much faster than 2-phase commit and much consistent than Vector clocks. He also introduced BDD and ZDD. ZDD is the only algorithm found by Japanese that is booked in Knuth's "the Art of Programming".

Higepon's talk about his implementation of Skipgraph Key-value-storage was also excellent. I've been very interested in his simple design of concurrent-join in SkipGraph ring. It admits three broken status in SkipList when reading and earns read-throughput. Moreover, he had created sample application of bulletin board, whose CSS design was cool. Stay tuned on mio!
My only question was mio's design for fault-tolerance and replication (and had forgotten asking). And what he said was "Good programmers never forget automation of unit-testing," ...

My talk on Yatce and general Erlang-C bindings was like this (partially Japanese, partially English):

I have a few additional topics: Linked-in driver may be best choice because ERTS's prim_file, prim_inet (which are the backend of file I/O and net I/O) are implemented with Linked-in driver. Usually for I/O intensive tasks linked-in driver is suitable and CPU intensive tasks NIF seems suitable. It will be the style. And my talk was Ust'ed.

@sleepy_yoshi's "Badly-educated guy seems in tutorial of Erlang" was a great laughter in hard-boiled workshop (which was organized by hard-algorithm, hard-software-design, hard-implementation). Of course he is far from badly-educated.

The pardy was great time because many great hackers around Erlang and other cool technologies such as linux-kernel, linux-distribution, OCaml and Python.