Leverage the -XStaticPointers extension
from GHC 7.10 onwards for distributed programming using lightweight
serializable closures. This package implements a serializable
closure abstraction on top of static pointers. Serializable closures
can be shipped around a computer cluster. This is useful for
implementing intuitive and modular distributed applications. See
this blog post for a hands on introduction
and this paper for the original motivation.
In GHC 8 and above, remoting a computation on another node using this library goes along the lines of
data NodeId
-- Assume we're given a spaw primitive.
spawn :: NodeId -> Closure (IO ()) -> IO ()
-- A computation to remote on another node.
hello :: String -> IO ()
hello name = putStrLn ("Hello, " ++ name)
main = do
name <- getLine
spawn "someAddress" (static hello `cap` name)An example of sending static pointers and closures through a communication channel is provided under examples/ClientServer.hs in the source repository.
distributed-closure does not implement sending/receiving/spawning
closures - that's left for higher-level frameworks. Only closure
creation, composition and (de)serialization.
