theburningmonk.com

After a long Easter hol­i­day filled with late night cod­ing ses­sions I find myself wide awake at 2am… good job I’ve still got my plu­ral­sight sub­scrip­tion and a quick look at the Algo­rithms and Data Struc­tures course again at least gave me some­thing to do to relax the mind with some back-to-school style imple­men­ta­tion of com­mon sort­ing algo­rithms in F#:

Whilst not the most per­for­mant imple­men­ta­tions I’m sure, I hope at least it goes to show how eas­ily and con­cisely these sim­ple algo­rithms can be expressed in F#! Now back to that sleep thing…

In Erlang, we have the Super­vi­sor behav­iour which makes it very easy to pro­vide the means to mon­i­tor and restart a whole net­work of work­ers and other super­vi­sors based on some con­fig­ured strategy.

The Mail­box­Proces­sor (aka agents) in F# doesn’t come with the same higher-level abstrac­tions (such as Erlang’s gen_server, gen_fsm behav­iours) by default, but it’s very easy to mimic some of their capa­bil­i­ties by build­ing on top of the stan­dard F# agents.

Luca Bolognese’s light­weight LAgent frame­work is a per­fect exam­ple and even pro­vides inter­est­ing pos­si­bil­i­ties such as hot swap­ping of code (although still some way off of what’s pos­si­ble in Erlang in this regard).

Sim­i­larly, the fol­low­ing snip­pet shows how you can start an agent with super­vi­sion so that any escaped excep­tions (which will crash the agent) are trapped and restarts the agent: