Joel Reymont wrote:
I think within Erlang nodes use a keep alive message to make sure they have not been split off. Quite often, though, you cannot detect if the foreign process exists. If it's a local process id and you send it a message and it's dead then you will get a no_proc exception, not so with a foreign process.
It does seem to me that the easiest way to verify if a node is alive is to send a keep-alive message to a housekeeping process on that node and consider it split off if a reply is not received after a timeout.
Sounds perfectly reasonable to me.
I'm not sure if it matters if a node is dead or just split off.
Erlang doesn't make the distinction, does it?
My thinking is that if it's good enough for Erlang, it is /at least/ good enough for Erlisp stage 1. We can always reconsider later on (even though it might be more painful then ;)).
- Dirk