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

81–90 of 204 posts

Re: Which companies are using Erlang, and why?

#81

Post by fouc »

verttii wrote: post #80
dominicl wrote: post #51

Having worked extensively with both Erlang and Elixir in the last 7 years, the main advantage for me has always been the smaller code base that those projects tend to produce when compared to other languages. Especially for projects that have some long-running components to them the Erlang built-in features allow writing really short yet fault resistant systems. The Supervisor system, the per process garbage collecti…

Interesting. Any input on erlang vs elixir debate? Which so you prefer as your primary tool personally?

You can easily drop into erlang from elixir, so you can have you cake and eat it too.

Re: Which companies are using Erlang, and why?

#82

Post by pdimitar »

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 have blogged quite extensively about it, for several years. Check their blog.

Re: Which companies are using Erlang, and why?

#83

Post by fouc »

dmitriid wrote: post #77
atupis wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Whatsapp served "at peak" like 450 million users with only 32 engineers.

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.

Re: Which companies are using Erlang, and why?

#84

Post by ihuk »

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 at you `inets/httpc`.

But the really big problem was the whole ecosystem. Build process was needlessly complicated. Surprisingly enough multicore support was not great. Performance was not that great. It seemed like a lot of libraries were abandoned after 2013. I could go on.

We ended up rewriting the whole thing in Java and, so far, it worked out great. And after Java 8, Java the language is not so bad. I still have somewhat found memories of Erlang but I don't miss it.

Re: Which companies are using Erlang, and why?

#85

Post by nurettin »

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…

Your question is very vague. What exactly do you mean by "the same results"? And which "alternative tools"? How do those tools provide "an alternative"?

Re: Which companies are using Erlang, and why?

#86

Post by dmitriid »

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.

> 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 async file IO by patching BEAM, added round-robin scheduling for async file IO, added multiple instrumentation patches. Instrumented scheduler to get utilization information, statistics for message queues, number of sleeps, send rates, message counts, etc. Made lock counting work for larger async thread counts. Patched to dial down spin counts so the scheduler wouldn’t spin.

BSD: Backported a TSE time counter. Backported igp network driver.

More Mnesia (Erlang) patches discussed here: [3]

Are you ready to do this for your Whatsapp?

> elixir/phoenix also achieved the same "2 million connections on single server" without needing those optimizations.

There's more needed to run a chat server than just "2 million empty connections".

---

[1] http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/2/26/the-whatsapp-archi...

[2] http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/3/31/how-whatsapp-grew-...

[3] https://www.infoq.com/presentations/whatsapp-scalability/

Re: Which companies are using Erlang, and why?

#87

Post by bryanrasmussen »

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.

Sure if you truly need something you will build it no matter what time or effort is involved, so in this way it is not a consideration. On the other hand if you can build it in half the time or cost you might find that some considering will be done as to which path should be chosen.

Re: Which companies are using Erlang, and why?

#88

Post by mapcars »

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.

Re: Which companies are using Erlang, and why?

#90

Post by ailideex »

rapsey wrote: post #29
ailideex wrote: post #16

Earlier 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.

How is the ability to do this measured and where can I see the measures of this?
Post reply on HN