FoundationDB's Flow – Bringing Actor-Based Concurrency to C++11
FoundationDB's Flow is a programming language extension for C++11 that introduces actor-based concurrency to improve system performance and reliability. It compiles asynchronous code into standard C++ while enabling deterministic simulation for testing complex distributed systems.
Why it matters
It demonstrates a specialized engineering approach to solving high-concurrency challenges in large-scale distributed databases.
FoundationDB began with ambitious goals for both high performance per node and scalability . We knew that to achieve these goals we would face serious engineering challenges while developing the FoundationDB core. We’d need to implement efficient asynchronous communicating processes of the sort supported by Erlang or the Async library in .NET , but we’d also need the raw speed and I/O efficiency of C++. Finally, we’d need to perform extensive simulation to engineer for reliability and fault tolerance on large clusters.
The article is a technical documentation summary regarding software engineering practices.
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