FoundationDB Lore

Community
1

I ran into Dave Rosenthal, who mentioned a couple interesting things:

  1. Flow is called Flow because in writing the actor compiler they realized that they only needed to identify the control flow keywords in order to be able to sufficiently parse C++. So what do you call something that only looks at control flow? Flow.

  2. The consensus implementation is indeed from Active Disk Paxos, but it’s only the Ranked Register, and whatever subset survived the following two days of the Daves working out a minimal implementation on a whiteboard.

6 Likes
2

Dave Rosenthal provided a fascinating fact about the name “Flow”—they used it because, when writing the actor compiler, they came to understand that it was sufficient to analyze only control flow keywords in order to parse C++. Regarding the consensus implementation, it is built upon Active Disk Paxos, that is, Ranked Register, and a minimal one that was tightened up by the Daves within a couple of days of work together on a whiteboard.