Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Which companies are using Erlang, and why?

erlang-solutions.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 204 posts

Re: Which companies are using Erlang, and why?

#111

Post by strmpnk »

fouc wrote: post #83
dmitriid wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatsapp also had multiple patches to Erlang VM, backported FreeBSD drivers and code etc. etc. Do not assume you'll be able to build your own Whatsapp just because of Erlang.

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.

That’s a bit misleading. Many of their patches were needed and had been contributed upstream by the time Phoenix was being tested as such. Still, this is a great benefit of sharing the ecosystem as such as everyone gets to benefit from this work.

Re: Which companies are using Erlang, and why?

#112

Post by zbentley »

uasm wrote: post #98
uasm wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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 :)

> But please downvote away :)

I don't think you're getting downvoted because you're not praising a piece of technology; you're getting downvoted because your tone seems rude, arrogant, and like you're on a witch-hunt rather than an honest inquiry. While tech fan-clubs do exist on HN, in my experience they respond quite constructively to reasoned criticism--if it's not phrased in an unkind way.

Re: Which companies are using Erlang, and why?

#113

Post by uasm »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #103
uasm wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

> What does "running to much success" mean exactly? When you ask questions like this, you sound combative, rather than curious - because the success of Discord is rather well documented. > Why could you not have achieved the same results using alternative tools? How can this be answered without trialling every other tool? Again, you sound combative.

> "you sound combative."

Sure, let's just have another thread full of "{tech} is best." on HN's frontpage. And let's get all personal about it. Enjoy the echo chamber!

Re: Which companies are using Erlang, and why?

#115

Post by zbentley »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #45
rapsey wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> ...in very little time and effort. You have a very naive view of large-scale distributed systems. For companies that truly need them, "time" and "effort" are never a consideration. Furthermore, the challenges facing these companies in battling project delays and cost overruns are the 100% organizational and political, not technical.

> For companies that truly need them, "time" and "effort" are never a consideration.

I'm not sure that's true. Sure, a few of the most famous software companies in the world have built their own at considerable cost. But numerous other huge, important companies are dependent on large-scale distributed systems whose major drawbacks (reliability and maximum scale, usually) and major benefits (simplicity, time/resources saved on not having to hire tons of specialists, quick development time) are based precisely in the time and effort constraints under which those systems were developed.

Re: Which companies are using Erlang, and why?

#116

Post by EdwardDiego »

uasm wrote: post #113
EdwardDiego wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What does "running to much success" mean exactly? When you ask questions like this, you sound combative, rather than curious - because the success of Discord is rather well documented. > Why could you not have achieved the same results using alternative tools? How can this be answered without trialling every other tool? Again, you sound combative.

> "you sound combative." Sure, let's just have another thread full of "{tech} is best." on HN's frontpage. And let's get all personal about it. Enjoy the echo chamber!

Feel free to read the Discord engineering blogs instead of demanding answers on HN mate.

Re: Which companies are using Erlang, and why?

#118

Post by zbentley »

atoav wrote: post #36

I 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.

I'm an Erlang novice, so take this with a grain of salt: Erlang's use in RMQ seems to have helped them immensely through the first few years of the system's life. They got an "all in one box" performant message broker off the ground, and relatively reliable, quite quickly.

However, RMQ did hit numerous issues that they had to work around on the Erlang platform. They had to engineer what was effectively their own scheduler on top of parts of the native Erlang one in order to prevent some starvation cases [1], and I have also heard that issues with Mnesia are at the root of some of the pathological behaviors (data loss) of some versions of RabbitMQ when restarting from a crash (this is admittedly anecdotal, so take it with a grain of salt).

[1] http://alvaro-videla.com/2013/09/rabbitmq-internals-credit-f...

Re: Which companies are using Erlang, and why?

#119

Post by dajonker »

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…

Scalability isn't something any language does out of the box. The design and implementation of the application determines whether it scales or not. In that sense, Erlang scales about as well as any other language. It does have some features that might make scalability easier to implement compared to some other languages, but you have to know how to use it properly.

Re: Which companies are using Erlang, and why?

#120

Post by HeXetic »

My only exposure to Erlang has been through RabbitMQ and while I can't comment much on the language itself, managing the packages is a dependency nightmare. Like some twisted, mutant, supervillain version of Python, a given version of RabbitMQ will only work with a certain version of Erlang (with horrible, hard-to-understand error messages on incorrect versions), and on RedHat/CentOS, the Erlang packages all misadvertise what exact versions they supply, necessitating awkward forcing of the dependencies or else Yum screws everything up.
Post reply on HN