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How does Crystal lang compare to the two? I know the syntax is more similar to Elixir, but the format seems closer to Go in the sense that it compiles to a binary.
[Deleted] Originally I'd had an off the cuff remark here of "apples to oranges". I'd like retreat to say that the article is actually a good overview and comparison
> It has since expanded into numerous other areas, such as web servers, and has achieved nine 9s of availability (31 milliseconds/year of downtime). I definitely want to read more about this.
This is how myths are created and perpetuated. This claims from a study of a particular model of Ericsson's ATM switch whose software was written in Erlang. A can tell you for sure that: * Ericsson has other switches and other telecom equipment whose software is written in C++ * other companies (Nokia, Cisco, Alcatel etc.) also built similar complex telecom equipment whose software was in C++ I'm going to bet that at…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erlang_(programming_language)
It also had this along the same lines though:
>As Tim Bray, director of Web Technologies at Sun Microsystems, expressed in his keynote at OSCON in July 2008:
"If somebody came to me and wanted to pay me a lot of money to build a large scale message handling system that really had to be up all the time, could never afford to go down for years at a time, I would unhesitatingly choose Erlang to build it in."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My understanding of Crystal is limited, but I think of the two, Go is the only one you would probably consider comparing it to, because of its native compilation. I don't think it has a very strong emphasis on concurrency, so comparing it to Elixir likely doesn't make much sense. Take that with a grain of salt though, as I'm not super familiar with the language.
Crystal has a similar concurrency model to Go, actually. It just doesn't yet have parallelism yet (coming soon).
> It has since expanded into numerous other areas, such as web servers, and has achieved nine 9s of availability (31 milliseconds/year of downtime). I definitely want to read more about this.
This is how myths are created and perpetuated. This claims from a study of a particular model of Ericsson's ATM switch whose software was written in Erlang. A can tell you for sure that: * Ericsson has other switches and other telecom equipment whose software is written in C++ * other companies (Nokia, Cisco, Alcatel etc.) also built similar complex telecom equipment whose software was in C++ I'm going to bet that at…
But also: Of course a language creates reliability. Null pointers are impossible in Erlang, whereas they are provable impossible to avoid in C++.
So people bring this up because Erlang programs are pretty much reliable by default (assuming you stick to OTP and its design).
To help it reach insane uptimes, Erlang also has a few features that are hard to replicate in C++, if not impossible. The main one is hot code replacement; being able to incrementally upgrade a system in a safe and controlled manner without restarting it is a huge benefit in such a system.
It's also trivial to attach to a running Erlang program and introspect it as if you're truly running inside it. Goes hand in hand with hot code replacement. With C++, you get fairly crummy, low-level things like gdb, without the ability to actually write C++ code while in the debugger.
Also, remember that crashes can occur in bug-free programs. Hardware failures can be hard to predict and handle.
Author here. This was published a week earlier than expected so just a heads up that there are a couple of edits coming.
I think it's comparing apples with oranges. They are two different species a compiled vs VM based language, one is a functional styled vs other has duck-tapping. Only thing I can see common is GC and a somewhat but very different concurrency programming paradigms, with message passing. Erlang and BEAM is an aged old giant with battle tested proven reliability, while golang is young lad with the flash like abilities e…
This is an implementation detail.
Anyone can write a VM for Go, or an AOT compiler to native code for Elixir.
> It has since expanded into numerous other areas, such as web servers, and has achieved nine 9s of availability (31 milliseconds/year of downtime). I definitely want to read more about this.
This is how myths are created and perpetuated. This claims from a study of a particular model of Ericsson's ATM switch whose software was written in Erlang. A can tell you for sure that: * Ericsson has other switches and other telecom equipment whose software is written in C++ * other companies (Nokia, Cisco, Alcatel etc.) also built similar complex telecom equipment whose software was in C++ I'm going to bet that at…
I did, at one of the the companies you list there.
We had outsourced and offshored code for modules on those switches you mentioned.
Have you ever had the pleasure to review C++ code in such type of projects?
I did, and hope to never do it again.