Hi Erisian,
Let me just say that I think this is awesome, and I'm very glad to hear that
Kamaelia's been helpful to you here.
I've always viewed the current implementation of Kamaelia/Axon to be just
that - an implementation of the ideas, with the idea of remainable tractable
& applicable in other languages, so I think this is really awesome :)
On Wednesday 16 September 2009 00:26:48 erisian wrote:
> Michael and friends...
>
> I've been a fan of Kamaelia for a couple years now and when I needed
> to come up with a componentized, flow-based development environment I
> modeled it after Axon for two reasons:
>
> 1. The excellent level of tutorial documentation
> 2. The straightforward architectural approach used by Axon.
>
> I actually just followed the "write your own axon" tutorial and
> implemented it in D. Of course, implementing an axon-like subsystem
> in a statically typed language was, well, challenging.
I can understand that! There's a deliberately very naive C++ implementation in
the repository here...
http://tinyurl.com/n3gsnz
... so I can understand the challenges involved in doing something more
useful :-) (incidentally this was also written based on following the
mini-axon tutorial :-)
> I now have MicroProcess, MicroScheduler, Inbox, Outbox and Component
> working. It's pretty simple right now, but I've run a basic test that
> creates three components (an even integer producer, an odd integer
> producer and an integer printer consumer), links them up and cycles
> the scheduler through about 1000 yield events.
>
> It works like a charm and it's incredibly fast.
That's really cool to here.
> This was all done using free tools (SciTE editor, llvm ldc d compiler,
> D language and the Tango Foundation Class Library).
I've not used/written any D nor really aware of it's language specific
foibles, but I *am* aware of what LLVM is, so I suspect that this could
actually really fly.
> Yields in D are implemented using the Tango "Fiber" class. I believe
> the assembler created generates setjmp/longjmps.
That would make sense. As you may see from the C++ version I've hacked up
before this essentially uses a class attribute to control syntactic sugar for
a switch statement (builds on duffs device...), which can under the hood be
optimised in a similar way.
> I don't think I could have done it easily in other languages static OO
> languages.
I'd agree with this, having tried it - it's possible though :-)
There is also a Java mini-axon floating out there, which was doable, but my
understanding was that aspects of Java did indeed make it harder.
> One of the reasons I used D was that it compiles all the
> way down to the metal and its support for generic programming using D
> templates are second to none. Some of it's introspection features
> were inspired by Python, Scheme and Lua.
I guess I ought to take a better look at D then :)
> Here's the current simple definition of Component:
>
> class Component : MicroProcess
> {
> Inbox!(SIGNAL) controlBox;
> LinkedList!(IntrFace) inboxes;
> LinkedList!(IntrFace) outboxes;
>
> this(char[] _name) {
> super(_name);
> inboxes = new LinkedList!(IntrFace);
> outboxes = new LinkedList!(IntrFace);
> controlBox = new Inbox!(SIGNAL);
> inboxes.append(controlBox);
> }
>
> // same as in parent
> void run() {
> Fiber.yield();
> }
>
> }
>
> Just thought you might like to know. Hopefully I can get it to alpha
> release quality in the near future.
If you would like to use the kamaelia code repository to work on this, you are
very welcome to do so.
To help you decide if that makes sense for you, the three places there I'd
normally suggested would be:
/trunk/Sketches/{your initials}/
... for development/playing around.
/branches/private_{your initials}_anything
... for feature branches (if appropriate).
and...
/trunk/Code/D/
For the specific implementation. (mirroring the idea behind
/trunk/Code/Python, /trunk/Code/CPP, /trunk/Code/Ruby - even if
the only practical version at present is the python version)
If that's helpful, please let me know. If you use elsewhere, please do let us
know, I'd like to link to your code :)
> If I can make it relatively compatible with Axon, it may be straightforward
> to port Kamaelia components. Eventually I hope to integrate it with GTK.
This sounds really good, and I'm more than willing to do what I can to support
you with this :-)
> If you have any questions, feel free to email me.
>
> have a good one,
You too! Many thanks for getting in touch like this - it's very much
appreciated.
Best Regards,
Michael.
--
http://yeoldeclue.com/blog
http://twitter.com/kamaelian
http://www.kamaelia.org/Home
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