Erlang's processes are the minimal unit of execution of Erlang BEAM virtual machine. Each process has its own ID, and can send/receive messages, register the name to the BEAM it's running, and can link with another process for error handling and monitoring. It even has its own process dictionary.
I've been thinking about a question for a few days: can you make a computer holding a process for more than 100 years? The word process here does not necessarily have to be the Erlang one, but the Erlang process will be a good candidate because the working environment it has to carry around with it is minimal and much smaller than that of UNIX process.
Keeping a process alive for a long time would not be possible if a process is confined to a single machine; the machine's failure means the immediate death of the process. So the process should be able to move around between multiple machines and make its clone on its own. Using shared memory should be avoided as possible. Realizing these characteristics with Erlang is less difficult than in other computer language systems.
I discovered the idea of having a persistent computer process is actually not my original. Google search engine tell me that Jim Gray has already published a technical report when he was in Tandem in 1985 (PDF copy from HP Labs) (a scanned text file of the report) with an idea of persistent process-pairs, as a part of his model of transactions for simple fault-tolerant execution.
In Gray's report, he describes a much smarter approach of making two persistent processes a pair to realize the persistency. If one of the pair fails, another one will show up and take over the actions of the failed one. This idea is much wiser than trying to keep a single process alive.
So now I find a way to realize persistent processes; next I need to learn how to implement them. It'll be a part of my new year's resolution for year 2010. A happy new year to you all the readers.
