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Which companies are using Erlang, and why?

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11–20 of 204 posts

Re: Which companies are using Erlang, and why?

#11
post #2

At least some of those examples are highly misleading: > There is no better example of Erlang’s reliability than the English National Health Service (NHS). [...] Using Riak (written in Erlang), the NHS has managed 99.999% availability for over five years. From what I could find out, NHS's Spine2 is mostly Python, with "a bit" of Erlang and Javascript. They do use Riak, but they also use Redis, RabbitMQ, Python/Tornad…

Post from the implementing engineer himself: http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2017-December/0...

> Almost all of the bespoke code is written in Python, but the message-passing architecture of the system and the approach to managing availability was directly inspired by reading about Erlang (in particular your book).

This approach is pretty interesting - I’d love to read about implementing Erlang-style availability in other languages.

Re: Which companies are using Erlang, and why?

#13
post #2

At least some of those examples are highly misleading: > There is no better example of Erlang’s reliability than the English National Health Service (NHS). [...] Using Riak (written in Erlang), the NHS has managed 99.999% availability for over five years. From what I could find out, NHS's Spine2 is mostly Python, with "a bit" of Erlang and Javascript. They do use Riak, but they also use Redis, RabbitMQ, Python/Tornad…

> the NHS has managed 99.999% availability

Really? I am not sure I trust this claim.

Re: Which companies are using Erlang, and why?

#14
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't true at all. Major functions of WhatsApp are implemented in Erlang and they're actively worked on. Source: Self. Engineer at FB.

I thought they use Elixir (like Kotlin :: Java).

Not only WhatsApp but there are no files checked into any Facebook source repository with .ex or .exs suffix and looks like Elixir.

Re: Which companies are using Erlang, and why?

#16
post #15

I have never programmed Erlang but it feels like it is the currently only language that is some kind of secret weapon. It has similar aura than Lisp had before that with Erlang you can do stuff beyond "normal" languages.

> It has similar aura than Lisp had before that with Erlang you can do stuff beyond "normal" languages.

Like what ?

Re: Which companies are using Erlang, and why?

#17
Although not in Erlang, Discord uses Elixir which runs on the BEAM VM to much success as well for our real time distributed system as well as VOIP signaling components. Looking back years later - it’s safe to say we wouldn’t have chosen anything else.

Re: Which companies are using Erlang, and why?

#18

WhatsApp used to use Erlang, not anymore. Facebook rewrote it completely in C++. https://www.quora.com/When-did-Facebook-switch-away-from-usi...

Maxim Fedorov talking about Erlang at Scale in WhatsApp two months ago - https://soundcloud.com/elixirtalk/episode-148-feat-maxim-fed...

Re: Which companies are using Erlang, and why?

#19
post #15

I have never programmed Erlang but it feels like it is the currently only language that is some kind of secret weapon. It has similar aura than Lisp had before that with Erlang you can do stuff beyond "normal" languages.

> It has similar aura than Lisp had before that with Erlang you can do stuff beyond "normal" languages. Like what ?

The fact that the entire ecosystem is based around the actor model is one of the primary ones. It's allowed for code that isn't simply a library, but effectively an entire application, to be used as open source to be dumped into your system, because it has tools like Erlang Term Storage, Mnesia, and other devices to make it easy.
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