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Which companies are using Erlang, and why?

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Re: Which companies are using Erlang, and why?

#91

Post by atemerev »

atupis wrote: 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.

Erlang is highly optimized to build reliable network communication systems (application-level routers, message brokers, stream aggregators, perhaps MMO game engines, chat backends, etc.) The secret weapons are actor model and process separation (like microservice architecture, but within a single app), supervision (isolated processes are restarted on failure, there is no difference between known "application" errors and exceptions), and beyond state of the art protocol parsing and construction facilities, for both binary and text protocols.

For some tasks (scientific computing, UIs, offline analytics) Erlang might not be the best choice. However, within its domain of applications, it really shines.

Re: Which companies are using Erlang, and why?

#92

Post by wildduck »

atupis wrote: 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.

My main interest in Erlang is mnesia.

A relational/object hybrid data model that is suitable for telecommunications applications. A DBMS query language, Query List Comprehension (QLC) as an add-on library. Persistence. Tables can be coherently kept on disc and in the main memory. Replication. Tables can be replicated at several nodes. Atomic transactions. A series of table manipulation operations can be grouped into a single atomic transaction. Location transparency. Programs can be written without knowledge of the actual data location. Extremely fast real-time data searches. Schema manipulation routines. The DBMS can be reconfigured at runtime without stopping the system.

Re: Which companies are using Erlang, and why?

#93

Post by atemerev »

mister_hn wrote: post #59
mister_hn wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is far better, IMHO

why so many negative votes? Isn't C++ a far more battle-tested language than Erlang? Hasn't C++ a far bigger community than Erlang? To all whose concern is Memory Management, learn about C++11 (and newer standards): smart pointers and heavy use of RAII pattern work shamefully good

Yes, it is battle-tested, and the testing result was the big failure: memory-related issues and vulnerabilities alone caused billions of dollars of damage, and on their way to cause more.

It is generally not a good idea at all to use C++ in network-facing applications.

Re: Which companies are using Erlang, and why?

#94

Post by ailideex »

vim-guru wrote: post #46
0xFACEFEED wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Time/effort/security/performance, really? IIRC the reasons to consider Erlang is purely to do with building a fault tolerant highly distributed system.

This. And it's ability to be introspected in realtime. It has a REPL-experience very much like lisp's do

Not sure what you mean by introspection in real time ... but if you mean runtime introspection this is not that much of a niche feature. If you mean remote debugging, again not that much of a niche feature. JVM and Javascript provides both.

Re: Which companies are using Erlang, and why?

#95

Post by filleduchaos »

uasm wrote: post #69
jhgg wrote: post #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.

> "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." You're a Staff Engineer at Discord. This response is extremely vague and non-informative. What does "running to much success" mean exactly? And why is it "safe to s…

They're not obligated to write an entire book in passing response to a thread on HN.

Re: Which companies are using Erlang, and why?

#96

Post by ihuk »

mapcars wrote: post #88
ihuk wrote: post #84

We developed Online Charging System in Erlang that served couple million subscribers for close to three years. I found the whole experience fairly terrible. Erlang is nice enough language and I don't mind the syntax but it's also kinda cumbersome and verbose at times. For example, adding `true -> ok` to every if statement gets old fast. Similarly, Erlang/OPT is a nice platform but some parts are fairly bad. Looking a…

Interesting, do you think Elixir would be better in your case? Also what was the amount of requests per second? Looks like you didn't really need Erlang's scalability.

No; as I understand it Elixir's only advantage is, arguably, better syntax. I don't mind Erlang's syntax that much.

We were handling, in peek hours, over 100k requests per second spread over 3 servers.

Funny you should mention scalability as something that somehow justifies Erlang's other shortcomings. I don't think scalability is something Erlang/OTP does out of the bag. One thing we learned the hard way is that Erlang does not do overload well at all. Erlang mailboxes are unbounded and it can get very messy very fast. I always found that design choice odd given Erlang's origins in telecommunications.

Now this is not to say you can't do massively scalable systems in Erlang, it's just that there's no silver bullet when it comes to scalability.

Re: Which companies are using Erlang, and why?

#97

Post by fouc »

dmitriid wrote: post #86
fouc wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The story of freebsd & erlang "needing" to be patched seems to be greatly exaggerated. Especially when it turns out that elixir/phoenix also achieved the same "2 million connections on single server" without needing those optimizations.

> The story of freebsd & erlang "needing" to be patched seems to be greatly exaggerated. The story is greatly underreported and all focus is only on "they run Whatsapp on Erlang with just ~50 engineers". Highscalability lists just some of the patches and optimisations they have here [1] and here [2] Here's an incomplete list of patches only. There's also tuning and optimisation: Erlang: Fixed head-of-line blocking in…

>Are you ready to do this for your Whatsapp?

I don't need to thanks to the fact that a bunch of those patches are now part of Erlang.

Re: Which companies are using Erlang, and why?

#98

Post by uasm »

uasm wrote: post #69
jhgg wrote: post #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.

> "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." You're a Staff Engineer at Discord. This response is extremely vague and non-informative. What does "running to much success" mean exactly? And why is it "safe to s…

I was challenging jhgg's comment, by requesting actual clarification and proof for the very broad statements they made. But if I'm honest, this entire thread is full of many such comments - propping up and praising {tech name} whilst providing little to no data to show for it. And that's how we got cargo culting. But please downvote away :)

Re: Which companies are using Erlang, and why?

#99

Post by mac01021 »

ihuk wrote: post #96
mapcars wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, do you think Elixir would be better in your case? Also what was the amount of requests per second? Looks like you didn't really need Erlang's scalability.

No; as I understand it Elixir's only advantage is, arguably, better syntax. I don't mind Erlang's syntax that much. We were handling, in peek hours, over 100k requests per second spread over 3 servers. Funny you should mention scalability as something that somehow justifies Erlang's other shortcomings. I don't think scalability is something Erlang/OTP does out of the bag. One thing we learned the hard way is that Erl…

> We were handling, in peek hours, over 100k requests per second spread over 3 servers.

How big was one server and what does one request entail?

Re: Which companies are using Erlang, and why?

#100

Post by abledon »

atupis wrote: 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.

> 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

It has a good marketable brand and 'appearance' for sure. A good Aura and level 3 magicks, but once you start leveling up your spell tree, like other comments in the thread have alluded to, the cracks start to show and you bleed out mana trying to scale what you initially thought would be an effortless process.

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