edwardt / reign

Rewrite Erlang In Go Nicely - a library for mimicking Erlang's mailboxes and clustering

reign

Reign, "Rewrite Erlang In Go Nicely", is designed to make it easy to port Erlang or Erlang-style programs into Go by providing a framework for Erlang-style message passing, including the creation of clusters.

That is, this is not intended to be a "hey, look, if I wrap a mutex around a slice I get something that looks like a PID" four hours of screwing around in Go... this is intended to be a real, production-quality replacement for Erlang-style message passing functionality, suitable for porting existing Erlang programs out of Erlang without significant architecture overhauls.

That said, it is not there yet. The local message passing functionality is, I believe, correct and API-stable, but the clustering is still in progress.

PLEASE DO NOT SUBMIT TO REDDIT, HACKER NEWS, ETC... while I'd like to put this on there eventually, first I'd like the examples, coverage, working clustering, etc. This library is being put up on GitHub even in this state because there was some interest in seeing it as-is. I am interested in pull-requests, and I am even interested just in emails that say that you are interested, as I work out how to spend my copious spare time.

Blog posts will probably appear on this topic on my blog, but there are none yet.

This module is fully covered with godoc, but test coverage is not yet 100%, and there's no example yet (which I intend to get to Real Soon Now (TM)). But there is a substantial test suite, which will be kept passing, coverage is currently at 84.4% of the code (and if you feel like contributing, a good place to start is by simply trying to increase that number), and I will be responsive to requests.

If this library sounds interesting to you, I would invite you to work with me on improving this code rather than starting again on your own. If you need help or more documentation, ask and ye shall receive.

If you do not need exactly Erlang-style semantics, note there are other libraries out there that may be better starting points. But I don't know of anything else for Go explicitly written with this goal in mind.

Security

One note about reign is that I wanted to take the opportunity to fix the security of Erlang clustering by making all clustering run across SSL TCP connections. See the README.certificate.md for information about how to create the requisite certificates.

Preliminary benchmarking seems to indicate that the overhead of running everything through SSL is negligible, so an earlier feature allowing you to choose whether you use it has been eliminated since it added significant complexity and danger with no benefits.