Scheme & Termite: Erlang alternative?

Gambit-C is a renowned Scheme interpreter and compiler, which can generate fast and portable C code. It features Termite library written in Scheme, which implements Erlang-like concurrency model for distributed programming. Let's see how it works.

First, create two nodes on two separate machines. Suppose machine one IP address is 192.168.1.101 while machine two is 192.168.1.102. Start a Scheme REPL on the first machine through tsi script shipped with Termite (it enhances standard Gambit gsi shell with Termite functions) and init it as node1:

(node-init (make-node "192.168.1.101" 4321))

Now start tsi on the second machine and init it as node2:

(node-init (make-node "192.168.1.102" 4321))

Stay at node2 shell and define an expression to identify node1:

(define node1 (make-node "192.168.1.101" 4321))

Now you can remotely spawn a process on node1:

(define p (remote-spawn node1
  (lambda ()
    (let loop ()
      (let ((x (?)))
        (! (car x) ((cdr x)))
        (loop))))))

The code above remotely spawns procedure p on node1, which waits for a signal in an infinite loop. When it receives signal x as a pair of sender and expression to evaluate, it evaluates the expression, sends its result back to the sender, and loops back. To see it in action evaluate the following expression in node1 REPL:

(! p (cons (self) host-name))

It causes command host-name to be sent to process p on node1. Now you can display received result with:

(?)

Erlang equivalent would look like this:

-module(p).

-export([start/0,loop/0]).

start() ->
    register(p, spawn(node1, p, loop, [])).

loop() ->
    receive
        {Pid, F} ->
            Pid ! (catch F()),
            loop()
    end.

You would call it with:

{p, node1} ! {self(), fun() -> N = node(), N end}.

and read its result with:

receive X -> X end.

So far so good. Now let's halt the Termite shell on node1:

,q

And try to invoke procedure p from node2 again:

(! p (cons (self) host-name))

The shell will segfault. Oops...

This is not the only problem with Termite. Gambit-C comes with gsc, a Scheme to C compiler, which I used to compile the sample script above. First, I had to go to /usr/local/gambc/current/lib/termite and compile Termite itself:

gsc termite

Then I prepared a sample file remote.scm:

(##include "~~/lib/gambit#.scm")
(##include "~~/lib/termite/termite#.scm")

(node-init (make-node "192.168.1.102" 4321))
(define node1 (make-node "192.168.1.101" 4322))

(define p (remote-spawn node1
  (lambda ()
    (let loop ()
      (let ((x (?)))
        (print (cdr x))
        (! (car x) ((cdr x)))
        (loop))))))

(! p (cons (self) host-name))
(print (?))
(newline)

And compiled it to executable binary code:

gsc -c remote.scm

gsc -link /usr/local/gambc/current/lib/termite/termite.c remote.c

gcc -o remote /usr/local/gambc/current/lib/termite/termite.c remote.c remote_.c \
    -lgambc -lm -ldl -lutil -I/usr/local/gambc/current/include -L/usr/local/gambc/current/lib

Now I started node1 on 192.168.1.101 again:

(node-init (make-node "192.168.1.101" 4321))

and tried to run remote binary code from 192.168.1.102:

./remote

Kaboom! Another segfault... Seems like compiled binary cannot handle message passing correctly, although it works in tsi interpreter.

I tried to create a bit more sophisticated Gambit-C/Termite application, but unfortunately I failed to find more useful documentation on Termite than its initial paper. There are also very few examples on Termite, and the most interesting I found come from Dominique Boucher's blog (my test script is based on those examples).

On the other hand, a great advantage of Gambit-C over Erlang is that it can translate Scheme applications to plain C, which than can be compiled to standalone executables using gcc. Thanks to this feature I managed to compile a few Gambit examples with OpenWRT-SDK and ran it on my home Linksys WRT54GL router with OpenWRT firmware - the only thing I had to do was to replace gcc command with mipsel-linux-gcc while compiling gsc output files.

To sum up, Termite is a very interesting and ambitious project, and its authors deserve applause for their job. Unfortunatelly, it seems that it is still in its experimental stage, and is not ready for production use yet. However, when finally done, it can be very useful Erlang alternative (thanks to the Gambit-C compiler) for programming embedded devices and systems, where Erlang VM does not exist. I think this post is also a good comment on Erlang and Termite.