Saturday, May 7, 2011

My technical interests for Erlang/OTP as of April 2011

This is a list of my technical interests for Erlang/OTP as of April 2011:

  • Catching up the latest cryptographic algorithms, including hash functions, shared-key cryptography, public-key cryptography, pseudo random number generators (PRNGs), while making them efficient in parallel/concurrent execution environment;
  • Delay tolerance network technologies which can handle days, weeks, months of message delivery delays;
  • Fundamental support functions of IPv6, especially for Distributed Erlang and epmd, and cryptographic transport support with SSL/TLS;
  • DNSSEC-compatible resolver implementation for inet_res module;
  • Large binary heap handling of BEAM, and the programming methodologies for the faster NIF implementation, including the performance measurement;
  • PRNGs with small context/internal-state size, e.g., Wichmann-Hill 1982/2006, LShift, XOR32;
  • PRNGs with large context/internal-state size, e.g., SFMT;
  • TAI or leap-second handling by NIF;
  • Privilege separation techniques between BEAM instances (e.g., virtualization, FreeBSD Jail); and
  • the effective usage and choice of port drivers, linked-in drivers, and NIFs

And projects I'm interested in (but not limited to):

  • Disco Project, a MapReduce implementation
  • ZeroMQ and other general queueing systems
  • UBF, BERT-RPC, and other messaging formats
  • CouchDB

And don't forget I'll be hosting the ACM Erlang Workshop 2011.

(This article is a revised version of http://heikou-konton.blogspot.com/2011/02/erlangotp.html (originally written in Japanese.)