On Sun, Jan 26, 2014 at 1:43 PM, Tim Watson
In Erlang, I can rpc/send *any* term and evaluate it on another node. That includes functions of course. Whether or not we want to be quite that general is another matter, but that is the comparison I've been making.
Note that Erlang gets away with this through being a virtual machine architecture; BEAM is about as write-once-run-anywhere as it gets, and the platform specifics are abstracted by the BEAM VM interpreter. You just aren't going to accomplish this with a native compiled language, without encoding as a virtual machine yourself (that is, the AST-based mechanisms). Perhaps you should consider fleshing out ghc's current bytecode support to be a full VM? Or perhaps an interesting alternative would be a BEAM backend for ghc. -- brandon s allbery kf8nh sine nomine associates allbery.b@gmail.com ballbery@sinenomine.net unix, openafs, kerberos, infrastructure, xmonad http://sinenomine.net