I'm sure that someone else can describe the actual history of Ndb
development much better, but here's my limited and vague
understanding.
- Ndb is developed in an environment (Ericsson AXE telecoms switch) where Ericsson's PLEX is the language of choice
PLEX supports multiple state machines (known as blocks) sending messages (known as signals) between them with some system-level conventions for starting up, restart and message classes. Blocks maintain internal state and define signal handling routines for different signal types. Very little abstraction within a block beyond subroutines is supported. (I'd love to hear some more detail on PLEX and how it has evolved). This architecture maps directly to the AXE processor design (APZ) …