Erlang-RED has been my project for the last couple of months and I would love to get some feedback from the HN community.
The idea is to take advantage of Erlangs message passing and low overhead processes to have true concurrency in Node-RED flows. Plus also to bring low-code visual flow-based programming to Erlang.
I know I can just write code, but I mean a DSL or some library specifically oriented around solving exactly these kinds of event driven sequencing/action problems.
It's a very simple array-of-object format with the graph/flow definitions defined by node ids and wires. It is fairly simple to create a minimalist interpretor for that format.
Also NodeRED is a very stable piece of software that has been around for over ten years. Yet I can take a flows.json file from today and have it run on the first releases of Node-RED, i.e., the format is backward compatible yet easily extendable.
> event driven sequencing/action problems.
Flow based programming[1] isn't strictly event driven, it's implemented that way in NodeJS because NodeJS does not have the concept of messages, only events.
Erlang has message passing between independent processes and therefore, IMHO, better suited to FBP.
Regarding NodeRED. I don't dispute that it's stable, but my experience actually running any nodejs based software is that it's all heavily designed for running out of a container and a massive PITA to maintain otherwise. I already have enough hassle running zigbee2mqtt on my FreeBSD home server which wouldn't work in a linux jail because I couldn't figure out how to expose the zigbee dongle to it.
Secondly, the reason I wanted to run one of these was not because I wanted to use it to automate my house, but instead because I wanted to understand how it works so I could replicate it in my own weird way.