distributed-closure/README.md

distributed-closure

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.