Saturday, December 27, 2014

Improved Python Support in Erlang/LFE

The previous post on Python support in Erlang/LFE made Hacker News this week, climbing in fits and starts to #19 on the front page. That resulted in the biggest spike this blog has seen in several months.

It's a shame, in a way, since it came a few days too early: there's a new library out for the Erlang VM (written in LFE) which makes it much easier to use Python from Erlang (the language from Sweden that's famous for impressing both your mum and your cats).

The library is simply called py. It's a wrapper for ErlPort, providing improved usability for Python-specific code as well as an Erlang process supervision tree for the ErlPort Python server. It has an extensive README that not only does the usual examples with LFE, but gives a full accounting of usage in the more common Prolog-inspired syntax Erlang. The LFE Blog has a new post with code examples as well as a demonstration of the py supervision tree (e.g., killing Python server processes and having them restart automatically) which hasn't actually made it into the README yet -- so get it while it's hot!

The most exciting bits are yet to come: there are open tickets for:
  • work on multiple Python server processes
  • scheduling code execution to these, and
  • full Python distribution infrastructure with parallel execution.
This could drastically change the picture for compute-intensive tasks in Erlang, Elixir, LFE, and Joxa. The Erlang VM was never intended to excel at the sort of problems that Python has traditionally focused on... yet it provides the sort of infrastructure that the Python community has been agonizing over for more than a decade. For Pythonistas, this may not be a very big deal ... but for the Erlang and functional programming communities, the LFE py project could be a life-saver for any number of projects which need easy-access to the strengths of Python.


3 comments:

Primordus said...

Very nice library, keep up the good work! I made a (somewhat) similar library a few months ago for c and c++ in elixir (https://github.com/Primordus/Cure in case you're interested). Definately going to keep an eye on this project :)

Anonymous said...

Thanks, Luc! I've just tweeted it :-) https://twitter.com/oubiwann/status/550871432788316160

SpeleoBuffalo said...

With the official end of life extension of Python 2.7 to 2020 some commercial GIS packages I can't replace have stated they will stay on 2.7 for the foreseeable future. I see ErlPort supports Python 2.5 - 2.7, do you have any plan for LFE py to also support Python 2.7?