Kresten Krab Thorup
My passion is creating software
Trifork
Kresten Krab Thorup is CTO of Trifork, a public Danish company providing
software solutions to government and financial services providers.
Trifork is also creator of the long-running JAOO conference, and
co-creator of QCon. As Trifork CTO Kresten in responsible for technical
strategy, and spends most of the time acting as internal consultant,
researching future technologies, as well as being editor for JAOO and
QCon conferences. Kresten has also been a principal contributor to
Trifork's own Java EE certified application server "Trifork T4", where
he authored the built-in CORBA ORB, a custom Java RMI implementation
(now part of Apache Yoko), the transaction manager, the database
connection management system, and the Java byte code rewriting
subsystem.
Kresten has been a contributor to several open source projects, including GCC, GNU Objective-C, GNU Compiled Java, Emacs, and Apache Geronimo/Yoko. Before joining Trifork, Kresten worked at NeXT Software (now acquired by Apple), where he was responsible for the development of the Objective-C tool chain, the debugger, and the runtime system. Kresten was on the committee for JSR-14 (adding generics to Java) which was closely related to the subject of his Ph.D. thesis.
Most recently, Kresten has founded the Erjang open source project (notice the J there), a virtual machine for Erlang running on the Java Virtual Machine.
Kresten has been a contributor to several open source projects, including GCC, GNU Objective-C, GNU Compiled Java, Emacs, and Apache Geronimo/Yoko. Before joining Trifork, Kresten worked at NeXT Software (now acquired by Apple), where he was responsible for the development of the Objective-C tool chain, the debugger, and the runtime system. Kresten was on the committee for JSR-14 (adding generics to Java) which was closely related to the subject of his Ph.D. thesis.
Most recently, Kresten has founded the Erjang open source project (notice the J there), a virtual machine for Erlang running on the Java Virtual Machine.
Kresten Krab Thorup is Giving the Following Talks
Erjang - A JVM-based Erlang VM
Over the last few years, I have been meeting "Erlang people" more and
more often, and I was getting this clear impression that "you people"
have some kind of magic ability to reason intuitively about concurrent
systems in a way that I could not. That bothered me, so I wanted to
learn Erlang. Being a language implementer, the most obvious way to do
that is to just go ahead and implement an Erlang VM, right?
The result of this "little exercise" is Erjang, an open-source JVM-based Erlang VM, which I think has potential to be useful as a means to push Erlang into new areas of application, help grow the Erlang community, and most importantly make all those Java-heads out there willing to learn how to do concurrency right. In this "brave new world" of networked services and multi-core everywhere, there are a lot of people who are challenged in providing even basic reliability, efficiency and correctness. My hope is that Erjang's existence can influence some of those outside the Erlang community to do better.
In technical terms, Erjang reads .beam files and compiles them to Java's equivalent .class files which are then read into the running JVM. It runs off a plain Erlang/OTP distribution - it only requires the beam files from there; Erjang itself is written in Java. As off this writing, it can run some non-trivial erlang programs, but is not yet capable of booting OTP [will have to update this abstract as we go along - follow updates on my blog]. Comparing the BEAM virtual machine and Erjang, the most obvious differences are that (a) Erjang will not be able to provide [soft] real-time guarantees since it uses Java's garbage collector, and (b) it has limited support for native code and port drivers (other than file and network I/O). The upside is the new ways this allows us to deploy Erlang systems.
In this presentation I will talk about how Erjang works, what behaviour to expect from Erlang programs running on top of Erjang, what I learned along the way, and demonstrate [live] that Erjang runs well enough to be obviously useful.
The result of this "little exercise" is Erjang, an open-source JVM-based Erlang VM, which I think has potential to be useful as a means to push Erlang into new areas of application, help grow the Erlang community, and most importantly make all those Java-heads out there willing to learn how to do concurrency right. In this "brave new world" of networked services and multi-core everywhere, there are a lot of people who are challenged in providing even basic reliability, efficiency and correctness. My hope is that Erjang's existence can influence some of those outside the Erlang community to do better.
In technical terms, Erjang reads .beam files and compiles them to Java's equivalent .class files which are then read into the running JVM. It runs off a plain Erlang/OTP distribution - it only requires the beam files from there; Erjang itself is written in Java. As off this writing, it can run some non-trivial erlang programs, but is not yet capable of booting OTP [will have to update this abstract as we go along - follow updates on my blog]. Comparing the BEAM virtual machine and Erjang, the most obvious differences are that (a) Erjang will not be able to provide [soft] real-time guarantees since it uses Java's garbage collector, and (b) it has limited support for native code and port drivers (other than file and network I/O). The upside is the new ways this allows us to deploy Erlang systems.
In this presentation I will talk about how Erjang works, what behaviour to expect from Erlang programs running on top of Erjang, what I learned along the way, and demonstrate [live] that Erjang runs well enough to be obviously useful.
