Representing the world with processes

[thiagomajesk]

@hubertlepicki

I don’t know if introducing another level of supervisors would be warranteed even then. Most likely not. It’s still the same runtime requirements, and you can identify the clusters of processes by using Registry or some other way if you have to. This is still my point that you try to represent real life concepts as processes instead representing processes as processes.

Just to be clear, I’m not that concerned about the (subjective) “best way” as much as toying around with the overall concept. BTW, I’m not making any claims about what should or shouldn’t be done. However, the premise of the question is well stated in the topic, feel free to make a suggestion of what you think is “right” for this scenario .

@APB9785

You know one process per city goes against the most fundamental principles of OTP?

The Erlangelist - To spawn, or not to spawn? was already linked for you…

Yes, someone already posted this link before, but I’m curious why you think that this use-case “goes against the most fundamental principles of OTP”. The post you linked also says: “Use processes to separate runtime concerns”, which seems appropriate.

I might be completely wrong here, but I have read and watched people comparing processes in Elixir/ Erlang with objects (in the traditional sense) many times. So, imagine me trying to make sense of “this goes against the most fundamental OTP principles” . There’s this other old topic over here, with a video of Joe Armstrong talking about processes in terms of “objects” as well: Objects vs Processes.

PS.: I’m not saying that processes should be used as objects from OOPL (I’m also not saying that we shouldn’t either), but I think you already got that this is not exactly the case. I’m sure folks already have strong opinions on what the “best practices” are.

@mpope

Anyways, a single DynamicSupervisor is probably the most simple way to set this up. Having that supervisor allocate a continent, then that continent can tell the supervisor to start children processes and link them to the ‘parent’ continent. Can do that recursively for each hierarchical level. Doing this combined with a hierarchical naming scheme could create a clean way to track what children need to be allocated using a single flat map.

Very cool idea @mpope! I think this hierarchical naming scheme makes it very obvious how we can track the processes and easily understand what are the “dependencies” even in a flat structure. It also makes the process of mapping those dependencies trivial if we rely on this map for lookups - very cool! I’d toy around with this idea right now if I had the time, but I think I’ll have to wait for the weekend .