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Which companies are using Erlang, and why?

erlang-solutions.com

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Re: Which companies are using Erlang, and why?

#121

Post by uasm »

zbentley wrote: post #112
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 :)

> 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.

I'm not for or against Erlang. While honestly attempting to learn something new today, I became frustrated with how devoid of content most of the comments in this thread are. "I'm {senior title}, and {tech name} is great" is as far as most of the comments go. That's just extremely mediocre.

Re: Which companies are using Erlang, and why?

#122

Post by ihuk »

eproxus wrote: post #109
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…

Not to refute your experience, but "adding true -> ok to every if statement" sounds like an anti-pattern. A couple of notes to elaborate: 1. If-statementes should rarely be used in Erlang because case is preferred 2. If you're returning ok everywhere, you could also just let it crash by doing something akin to true = function(). Always go for let it crash first, unless you really know you can handle the error sensibl…

Agreed. Couple of clarifications/observations.

(1) there are situations like this:

    if
    DeductCreditInRatingGroup ->
      log("deducting credit...");
    end;
unfortunately you cannot write it this way. You have to write it as:

    if
    DeductCreditInRatingGroup ->
      log("deducting credit...");
    true -> ok
    end;
Not a huge deal but it's annoying.

(2) Let it crash attitude is something I never understood. It's just not something you can do most of the time. If subscriber consumed 2MB and you let it crash in the middle of rating function you just "lost" 2MB. With couple of million subscribers on LTE that turns into very expensive error handling very fast.

(3) We actually ended up using hackney.

(4) We were not doing anything compute heavy. I think our application was well architected and we had no problem fitting it into OTP "framework". Comparing CPU and memory usage to our Java implementation, Java is more performant.

edit: fixed code formatting.

Re: Which companies are using Erlang, and why?

#123

Post by namelosw »

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…

If you use Java I'm assuming you are not using process. If so, I believe Phoenix is no worse than Java applications in terms of ease of use and scalability etc.

And it in terms of performance it indeed require some design experience on Erlang process. But it shouldn't be bad. After all WhatsApp and Discord have run on top of it with very few engineers to support massive customers before. I doubt online charging system could be more chatty.

Re: Which companies are using Erlang, and why?

#124

Post by ihuk »

dajonker wrote: post #119
ihuk wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly my point. It scales about as well as any other language so why not use a language that's nicer to work with?

Re: Which companies are using Erlang, and why?

#125

Post by not_a_cop75 »

HeXetic wrote: post #120

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 misadver…

You might be right, but what you say sounds like it's coming from a true outsider. What would someone within the community say?

Re: Which companies are using Erlang, and why?

#126

Post by bobwaycott »

aloer wrote: post #114

What would be a good use case to learn erlang/elixir with that is not just a chat app? Online gaming? Collaborative tools?

If you really want to find yourself digging into a lot of different features in the Elixir ecosystem, you can’t go wrong with collaborative tools. If you really want to play with the latest hotness in Elixir, and dig into a challenge or two, I’d suggest building a light multi-user blogging system that leverages Phoenix LiveView for real-time Markdown->HTML previews, while allowing simultaneous editing/previewing by two users. Put a DB behind it so you can also play with Ecto. Outside of the 3 lines of JS you need to wire up LiveView, limit yourself to writing 0 additional lines of JS. Do everything in Elixir and eex/leex templates only. Since you’re focused on learning, skip dealing with user auth stuff. There will be some challenge to deal with handling multiple edits at the same time. May as well play with doing DB persistence in your LiveView, without any refresh. :)

Online gaming can be a good option—if building games is your thing. Personally, I find game-based demos/exercises with certain tools to be a bit too far removed from my daily work to help certain concepts really take root.

Re: Which companies are using Erlang, and why?

#127

Post by aloukissas »

Awesome write-up, Francesco! To add to the success stories, our team's previous startup (Bugsense) was a huge user of Erlang, which allowed to scale to hundreds of thousands of concurrent devices with just a handful of servers [1]. It was a no brainer that we would now use Elixir for our current startup (AgentRisk [2,3]) and we wouldn't have been happier with our choice, especially paired with Phoenix, which is hands-down the best web framework we've ever worked with.

[1] http://www.erlang-factory.com/static/upload/media/1394234889...

[2] https://agentrisk.com

[3] https://blog.agentrisk.com

Re: Which companies are using Erlang, and why?

#128

Post by liveoneggs »

HeXetic wrote: post #120

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 misadver…

why wouldn't you just use rabbit rpms that depend on the exact correct versions of erlang? aka els-erlang

https://www.erlang-solutions.com/resources/download.html

Linux distros have always been terrible places to find reliable packages.

Re: Which companies are using Erlang, and why?

#129

Post by kitplummer »

Fairly blind question: does Erlang|Elixir and BEAM make any sense in a pseudo-embedded, edge compute or IoT environment with constrained resources (CPU and memory), or even ARM architecture? Aside from the developer-side things, if AMQP were to the centralized communications hub (e.g. RabbitMQ) does using Nerves on devices make any performance benefit - meaning BEAM and app(s) there?

The intent would be pre-process data and stream inward, or simply be a command-and-control interface -> process and provide response.

Re: Which companies are using Erlang, and why?

#130

Post by cmrdporcupine »

atemerev wrote: post #93
mister_hn wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Google disagrees with you.
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