[erlang-questions] Would like some feedback

Frans Schneider schneider@REDACTED
Tue Nov 24 19:18:56 CET 2015


Dear list,

I've been learning Erlang in my spare-time for some time now and would 
love some feedback on a project I recently started. Since I have no 
coworkers or other people to get feedback from, maybe somebody on this 
list could have a quick look.
The things I find particular difficult is defining a proper API, to 
decide what goes into a new process or is done in the calling process 
and dealing with errors. I have no formal training as a programmer which 
may be the reason I have trouble to get these things right.

The project I took [1] was to implement the Axolotl ratcheting protocol 
from Open Whisper Systems [2]. The protocol [3] itself didn't look very 
difficult, but since there are no proper specs for the total system, I 
used the libaxolotl-java implementation as a starting pont [4]. Reading 
the Java code probably was the hardest part of the whole project.

I think I covered most of the functionality of the libaxolotl-java 
library. I haven't verified interoperability between my implementation 
and libaxolotl-java since that would require me to start coding in Java 
which is not something I am looking forward to.
Comparing my Erlang code with the original Java code, I needed far less 
lines of code and, I think, the code is much easier to understand. Also, 
building and deploying the code seems much simpler.

So, any comments are most welcome.

Thanks,

Frans

[1] https://github.com/schnef/axolotl
[2] https://www.whispersystems.org/
[3] https://github.com/trevp/axolotl/wiki
[4] https://github.com/WhisperSystems/libaxolotl-java
Nice implementation https://github.com/rxcomm/pyaxo
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