Erlang plists

This is a fork of the Google Code SVN repository for plists. The original code is available at: http://code.google.com/p/plists/.

Summary

plists is a drop-in replacement for the Erlang module lists, making most list operations parallel. It can operate on each element in parallel, for IO- bound operations, on sublists in parallel, for taking advantage of multi-core machines with CPU-bound operations, and across erlang nodes, for parallizing inside a cluster. It handles errors and node failures. It can be configured, tuned, and tweaked to get optimal performance while minimizing overhead.

Almost all the functions are identical to equivalent functions in lists, returning exactly the same result, and having both a form with an identical syntax that operates on each element in parallel and a form which takes an optional "malt", a specification for how to parallize the operation.

fold is the one exception, parallel fold is different from linear fold. This module also includes a simple mapreduce implementation, and the function runmany. All the other functions are implemented with runmany, which is as a generalization of parallel list operations.

Documentation is available at http://freeyourmind.googlepages.com/plists.html, and a blog post with some examples at http://plists.wordpress.com/2007/09/20/introducing-plists-an-erlang-module-for-doing-list-operations-in-parallel/.

Building and Installing

Using Rebar

plists now supports the use of rebar, and this is the recommended way to compile the library. This is how it will be used by those who include it as a dependency in their own rebar.config files.

To build:

$ rebar compile

Rebar doesn't support installing libraries in a system, so you should use the Makefile for that.

Using the Makefile

To build, simply use the Makefile provided in the project:

$ make compile

This will create a beam file in the ./ebin directory.

If you'd like to build the docs:

$ make docs

The updated docs will be in the ./doci directory.

To install plists in your Erlang system, simply point the make target at your preferred library. For example:

$ sudo ERL_LIBS=`erl -eval 'io:fwrite(code:lib_dir()), halt().' -noshell` \
    make install

Bonus Materials

Examples

There are two examples provided as well: one using the Erlang synchronous http client (and not using plist), and the other using the async http client and using plists. Do note that these are using LFE ;-)

• http-sync.lfe
• http-async.lfe