The State of Axum
Those who have followed this blog will have noticed that it’s been a long time since we posted anything new about Axum, and the time has come to state publicly that which may have been clear to some but not others, that we’re not currently pursuing productization.
We have seriously examined the possibility of releasing the source code under an OSS license, but that, too, will require time that we don’t have that much of. At this time, no one is assigned paid hours to work on Axum, but we are still entertaining fantasies about an open-source release sometime in the future by doing some extra work during down times.
That said, the incubation effort was very successful in our opinion: several of the concepts embodied in Axum live on in the next versions of C# and .NET: C# and VB will support their own form of asynchronous methods, while .NET is adding support for data-flow constructs following the patterns we set up in Axum and the C++ concurrency runtime.
On the other hand, the concepts around safe parallelism and agent-based programming were seen by many as too far outside the mainstream to be adopted now in languages like C# and VB. The idea of Axum was to not force these concepts on general-purpose languages, so those of us who have work on Axum are not surprised.
It’s disappointing to have to post this kind of entry, but it’s better to acknowledge the situation than to stick our heads in the sand and pretend that everything’s OK.
Niklas, Artur & Josh
Axumites
Comments
Anonymous
February 28, 2011
I'm very sorry to hear this. While I haven't actually used or tried to use Axum, I've been following since it was called Maestro and I thought it had a lot of potential.Anonymous
February 28, 2011
That's a shame, but at least parts of the product will live on. I will miss the ease of creating remote actors however.Anonymous
March 01, 2011
That's a real shame, cos it provided a really nice paradigm.Anonymous
March 01, 2011
It's very sad, but Axum has been without doubt a new way to think parallel for a lot of folks. You have done a good job and thank you for that.Anonymous
March 05, 2011
Sad to hear it has come to an end. But glad to hear that efforts have at least made it into or are heading towards C#.Anonymous
March 16, 2011
sad news, i've been using axum for private projects for a few weeks now and have already recommended it to my boss which seemed really interested in it, and now i come here and read this :( i see axum as erlang done right and for the CLR, coouldnt be better! i really hope it gets released in the future even if an OSS project so the community can continue working on it, please consider it, this language is too good to die like thisAnonymous
March 20, 2011
Very sad indeed. Many great projects have been shut down as of late. Great project with lots of potential. Have enjoyed using it for some time... ThanxAnonymous
March 30, 2011
I guess Steve Balmer must have assigned you guys to write code for Windoze Phone 7 dugh !. Quit now and join Google!!!Anonymous
April 19, 2011
Does it mean Axum is dead? I was considering my BSc thesis preparation about Axum and its applications. Now I'm quite stuck.Anonymous
January 06, 2012
That's very sad, I just discovered this today and it looked like Axum had lots of potential. I like the language features and syntax. If you can, keep it going!! Thanks!Anonymous
November 16, 2012
Thank you for all the advances you've broght.Anonymous
September 07, 2013
Any news on a release of the source code of Axum? It doesn't need to be cleaned up, it doesn't need to be pretty, it doesn't need to come with much documentation; just put the source code on some Github-like site!