FWIW, wechat's messaging server is in erlang. In terms of scale, it's probably bigger than whatsapp.
Interesting. Source?
Which companies are using Erlang, and why?
21–30 of 204 posts
Re: Which companies are using Erlang, and why?
#22Telecom companies
Re: Which companies are using Erlang, and why?
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
You're still not explaining why this allows to do things that can't be done in other languages.
Probably because that claim makes no sense.
Re: Which companies are using Erlang, and why?
#24WhatsApp used to use Erlang, not anymore. Facebook rewrote it completely in C++. https://www.quora.com/When-did-Facebook-switch-away-from-usi...
That post is about Facebook Chat, not WhatsApp.
Re: Which companies are using Erlang, and why?
#25FWIW, wechat's messaging server is in erlang. In terms of scale, it's probably bigger than whatsapp.
The opposite is true by a non trivial margin. (It doesn’t change the fact that WeChat is massive scale.)
https://www.statista.com/statistics/258749/most-popular-glob...
Re: Which companies are using Erlang, and why?
#26I 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 ?
I think Whatsapp served "at peak" like 450 million users with only 32 engineers.
Re: Which companies are using Erlang, and why?
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
In my experience, the message passing architecture of the NHS system almost exclusively uses Paper.
Re: Which companies are using Erlang, and why?
#28worked with Erlang lately in a side project, I think the actor model is really cool (and the FP style), but the error messages are not helpful at all (at least for a beginner), I wonder how other people manage.
Re: Which companies are using Erlang, and why?
#29I 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 ?
Erlang's advantage is being able to build a featureful, secure, scalable and performant enough communication backend in very little time and effort. This is a niche in which it can not be beaten.
Re: Which companies are using Erlang, and why?
#30worked with Erlang lately in a side project, I think the actor model is really cool (and the FP style), but the error messages are not helpful at all (at least for a beginner), I wonder how other people manage.
Runtime error messages or compilation error messages? I assume compilation. This is true. Compilation messages are bare bones.
But on the other hand the language compared to other modern languages is tiny and figuring out why something does not compile is a non-issue beyond an absolute beginner.