Something I find interesting is that the tech stack is often chosen by non-engineers/founders. So languages and frameworks are marketed to business people. Freelance work is often weak on the requirements, but they have strong opinions on what language and framework to use.
Which companies are using Erlang, and why?
31–40 of 204 posts
Re: Which companies are using Erlang, and why?
#32WhatsApp used to use Erlang, not anymore. Facebook rewrote it completely in C++. https://www.quora.com/When-did-Facebook-switch-away-from-usi...
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.
They (you) had to modify beam vm heavily though.
Re: Which companies are using Erlang, and why?
#33At 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…
Note that rabbitmq is also written in Erlang.Furthermore, NHS is also involved in the maintenance of Riak since the collapse of Basho.
Re: Which companies are using Erlang, and why?
#34FWIW, 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...
Then the question comes if wechat and qq uses the same backend as they are owned by the same company.
Re: Which companies are using Erlang, and why?
#35Although 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.
What was the reason to choose Elixir over Erlang? Just familiarity with the language?
Re: Which companies are using Erlang, and why?
#36I have seen that Erlang is used in RabbitMQ, if I recall right their argument was that Erlang is particularily well suited for that kind of asynchonous message queue stuff. I donlt know all too much about Erlang, so I cannot judge if that claim makes sense.
Re: Which companies are using Erlang, and why?
#37FWIW, wechat's messaging server is in erlang. In terms of scale, it's probably bigger than whatsapp.
WhatsApp’s servers are largely written in Erlang too, right?
Re: Which companies are using Erlang, and why?
#38Although 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.
What was the reason to choose Elixir over Erlang? Just familiarity with the language?
Not OP, but have used Elixir pretty extensively; the major selling points for me are the friendlier syntax and more active community support, plus with rebar3 + Elixir's seamless Erlang interop you really don't give up anything, you can use any existing Erlang/Elixir libraries with a single syntax. It's pretty great.
Re: Which companies are using Erlang, and why?
#39worked 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.
I'm using Erlang for a production system at work and I completely agree, the error messages tend to be terrible. Once you've run into many errors you start recognizing patterns though (part of the problem is that the errors are not English sentences but data dumps with indicators like `badfun`, these you just have to learn to interpret) and Erlang makes up for the bad error messages in other ways. But yes, often I end up reasoning through the code to solve the problem, with the error message only roughly pointing me in the right direction, to a larger extent than in other languages.
Re: Which companies are using Erlang, and why?
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Time/effort/security/performance, really? IIRC the reasons to consider Erlang is purely to do with building a fault tolerant highly distributed system.