Implementing a ring of processes (Exercise Nodes-4 from the Programming Elixir > 1.6)

Questions / Help
1

Hi everyone! Super excited to join the community here :slight_smile:

I’m reading the book “Programming Elixir 1.6” from PragProg and hit the following exercise:

The ticker process in this chapter is a central server that sends events to
registered clients. Reimplement this as a ring of clients. A client sends a
tick to the next client in the ring. After 2 seconds, that client sends a tick
to its next client.
When thinking about how to add clients to the ring, remember to deal
with the case where a client’s receive loop times out just as you’re adding
a new process. What does this say about who has to be responsible for
updating the links?

My initial naive idea is as follows:

  • Each process knows it’s ‘next’ process
  • When a registration message with a new client PID arrives, point itself to the new client, and the new client to the ‘next’ client. This way, a new client can be inserted into the ring at any point.

However, I’m seeing nasty race conditions, as each addition to the ring has 2 messages, that tend to arrive in whichever order - by design.

Is such implementation possible in principle, or should I stick to a central process that maintains the state in a single location instead?

Very new to Elixir, so I’m probably mis-applying the programming paradigms here :slight_smile:

defmodule Ch16.Exercise4.TickerRing do
  @interval 2000
  # @name :ticker_ring

  def generate(client_id, next_pid, is_active) do
    receive do
      {:tick, sender_id} ->
        IO.puts("client ##{client_id} received tick from ##{sender_id}")
        generate(client_id, next_pid, true)

      {:repoint, new_client_pid} ->
        IO.puts(
          "client ##{client_id} received repoint to PID ##{inspect(new_client_pid)}, current next in line: #{inspect(next_pid)}"
        )

        generate(client_id, new_client_pid, is_active)

      {:register, new_client_pid} ->
        IO.puts(
          "client ##{client_id} received registration with PID ##{inspect(new_client_pid)}, current next in line: #{inspect(next_pid)}"
        )

        if(is_nil(next_pid)) do
          # new client with nil next pid
          send(new_client_pid, {:repoint, self()})
          generate(client_id, new_client_pid, is_active)
        else
          # old client receiving a registration
          send(new_client_pid, {:repoint, next_pid})
          generate(client_id, new_client_pid, is_active)
        end
    after
      @interval ->
        if(is_active) do
          IO.puts("tick at ##{client_id}, sending to #{inspect(next_pid)}")

          if(next_pid != nil) do
            send(next_pid, {:tick, client_id})
            generate(client_id, next_pid, false)
          else
            generate(client_id, next_pid, is_active)
          end
        else
          # IO.puts("client ##{client_id} not active, doing nothing...")
          generate(client_id, next_pid, is_active)
        end
    end
  end
end

pid1 = spawn(Ch16.Exercise4.TickerRing, :generate, ["1", nil, true])
IO.puts("pid1: #{inspect(pid1)}")
pid2 = spawn(Ch16.Exercise4.TickerRing, :generate, ["2", nil, false])
IO.puts("pid2: #{inspect(pid2)}")
send(pid1, {:register, pid2})
pid3 = spawn(Ch16.Exercise4.TickerRing, :generate, ["3", nil, false])
IO.puts("pid3: #{inspect(pid3)}")
send(pid2, {:register, pid3})
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