Hacker News Reader

Excuse a noob question, but what gets transmitted over the wire as `F` in the `become` message? Source, bytecode, function name, etc? ie. does the universal server need F in its "classpath" (or whatever the Erlang equivalent is)? If not, are there platform &| security issues when calling the universal server distributed?

Genuine question. It's a fantastic attribute of Erlang to be able to do this.

View on HN

It will be a closure "fun () -> ...", and it's serialized bytecode + a copy of captured variables — remember, they all are immutable. For a intra-node call it will be a reference to the bytecode, no need to copy anything.

However if this code refers to any functions from modules via syntax "foo:bar/1" then these references will be resolved on the target node, and both nodes better have the same versions of modules loaded.

There are no extra security issues, because at this point you already assume that the other side is trustworthy.

I think you can assume that they are sending something like bytecode, but might optimize that, if both are eg on the same physical machine.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com