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Ask HN: What have you built with Erlang?

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Ask HN: What have you built with Erlang?

#1
A recent Erlang article in Communications of the ACM portrays Erlang as a specialized language for messaging/chat (Facebook chat, XMPP, etc.)and distributed storage (CouchDB, Riak, etc.)

I think this is probably right, but I'm wondering what else you've built in Erlang. Was it a good fit? Why or why not?

Re: Ask HN: What have you built with Erlang?

#2
I built a very specialized mail server (MTA).

It was a tedious, frustrating experience, even though you'd think it would be the perfect language.

It ended up being too slow (probably because of all the string processing)

In my entire programming career, I've never before had to join a mailing list and ask questions to get things done, that should tell you something.

Re: Ask HN: What have you built with Erlang?

#3
I have built the backend (game logic and comet) for http://www.iluminatus.ro, a trivia-like multiplayer game for the Romanian market. We're going to release an english version soon.

It was a great fit. It lacks Unicode processing capabilities by default, but there are a few open source libraries for that. The only thing I dislike about Erlang is the poor string manipulation and lack of clean structures (Erlang's records are an ugly hack IMO).

Re: Ask HN: What have you built with Erlang?

#4
I built a Twitter client, with j2me on handsets and Erlang server at the back to handle all communications with twitter and few other services for image hosting, etc. It was my second project in Erlang and was very rewarding experience. Part I especially liked, is that I could deploy updates to the server while it was running, with no desruption to clients at all. http://pavo.me/

Re: Ask HN: What have you built with Erlang?

#6
Phonebooth, a hosted telephone system http://www.phonebooth.com

Great fit. OTP process restart characteristics. Per-tenant process separation. Process abstraction, in general, rather than threads. Finite state machine behaviors. Live code upgrades. Mnesia database.

Only real downside was it took the rest of the team a bit of time to become effective in Erlang... about 4 to 6 months.

Re: Ask HN: What have you built with Erlang?

#7
post #2

I built a very specialized mail server (MTA). It was a tedious, frustrating experience, even though you'd think it would be the perfect language. It ended up being too slow (probably because of all the string processing) In my entire programming career, I've never before had to join a mailing list and ask questions to get things done, that should tell you something.

I'd be interested in hearing more about the frustrations.
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