How I fell in love with Erlang • Hacker News Board

Re: How I fell in love with Erlang

#261

Post by nakamoto_damacy » Sat, Nov 15, 2025, 3:01 PM UTC

simoncion wrote: post #183

nakamoto_damacy wrote: post #50

Will it ever run in WASM? EDIT: there is Lumen, but not sure if it's stalled or still going.

> Will it ever run in WASM? A ten-second search reveals [0]. (Have Kids These Days forgotten all about Emscripten?) However, given that web browser pages are often short-lived, I don't see what benefit bringing in all of Erlang and its VM gets you, other than the fact that you've pulled off the stunt. [0] https://www.antvaset.com/erlang-otp-wasm >

WASM runs on the edge, e.g. in Cloudflare workers (but I mean more generally) .. And it is an emerging compatibility layer

Re: How I fell in love with Erlang

#262

Post by lomase » Mon, Nov 17, 2025, 11:30 AM UTC

simoncion wrote: post #260

lomase wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was not written in LISP, but a LISP dialect, called GOOL. Wich means: GAME ORIENTED OBJECT LANGUAJE.... The example you gave about how functional laguages can make comercial videogames... has objects at the core of its design.

> The example you gave about how functional laguages can make comercial videogames... No. As I said: > I expect that more video games sold at retail back in the day were -whether entirely or just in part- written with weird languages and runtimes than we would expect.

Back in the day videogames were wrote in assembly.

Why you expect weaker hardware to uses more libraries and programming larguages than today?

Makes no sense. On weaker hardware we had back in those days you had to work as close to the metal as possible.

Re: How I fell in love with Erlang

#263

Post by simoncion » Wed, Nov 26, 2025, 7:49 AM UTC

lomase wrote: post #262

simoncion wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The example you gave about how functional laguages can make comercial videogames... No. As I said: > I expect that more video games sold at retail back in the day were -whether entirely or just in part- written with weird languages and runtimes than we would expect.

Back in the day videogames were wrote in assembly. Why you expect weaker hardware to uses more libraries and programming larguages than today? Makes no sense. On weaker hardware we had back in those days you had to work as close to the metal as possible.

> Back in the day videogames were wrote in assembly.

The multitasking, multi-user system known as UNIX was built on and for the PDP-11. The PDP-11 was only 7x larger than the NES.

FORTRAN 77 (from 1977) is roughly contemporary to the PDP-11, as are many other languages still in wide use today.

Back in the day, compilers, interpreters, and virtual machines were all things that were regularly used... and state-of-the-art computers were smaller than you'd expect.