Parallel List Operations in Erlang

One of the first things that struck me when I was first browsing through the documentation for the Erlang lists module was the lack of support for parallelism. Functions such as lists:map are clearly prime candidates for this, although obviously you might sometimes require a serial implementation.

Needless to say, Erlang makes it easy to implement this kind of thing anyway but I just expected to find it there. You can imagine my excitement then when I came across plists, a module that’s compatible on a function-by-function basis with Erlang’s lists module, adding a range of powerful but simple to use parallel processing options. In addition, mapreduce and several other operations are added.

I haven’t had a chance to play yet, and it’s far too late in the evening to start now, so for the full low-down have a read here and then move on to the docs here. On top of all the nice looking functionality, you’ll soon be able to discuss ‘malts’ with those in the know.