distributed-closure

Serializable closures for distributed programming.

https://github.com/tweag/distributed-closure

Version on this page:0.4.2.0
LTS Haskell 22.13:0.5.0.0
Stackage Nightly 2024-03-14:0.5.0.0
Latest on Hackage:0.5.0.0

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BSD-3-Clause licensed by Mathieu Boespflug
Maintained by [email protected]
This version can be pinned in stack with:distributed-closure-0.4.2.0@sha256:6d7651a8c4165419787855a9a4554292353f51e61d5979895af6269d8d10ad0b,2153

Module documentation for 0.4.2.0

distributed-closure

Build status

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.

Example

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.