Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Scaling Large Projects With Erlang

Posted by Soulskill on from the right-tool-for-the-right-job dept.

Delchanat points out a blog entry which notes, "The two biggest computing-providers of today, Amazon and Google, are building their concurrent offerings on top of really concurrent programming languages and systems. Not only because they want to, but because they need to. If you want to build computing into a utility, you need large real-time systems running as efficiently as possible. You need your technology to be able to scale in a similar way as other, comparable utilities or large real-time systems are scaling — utilities like telephony and electricity. Erlang is a language that has all the right properties and mechanisms in place to do what utility computing requires. Amazon SimpleDB is built upon Erlang. IMDB (owned by Amazon) is switching from Perl to Erlang. Google Gears is using Erlang-style concurrency, and the list goes on."

2 of 200 comments (clear)

  1. Why Erlang Matters by mpapet · · Score: 5, Insightful

    1. Multicore ready.
    Erlang will use them. Write your application in Erlang and it's done for you.

    2. Scales well.
    As an example, http://yaws.hyber.org/ scales very nicely when loads increase. Your basic LAMP/LYMP setup runs much better on vanilla hardware.

    3. Designed for telecom
    The architects designed the language to run in a telecom environment so things like upgrades can be done while the application is running.

    Yaws in particular needs your help. Failover clustering inside the yaws server would be wonderful. Right now, it uses CGI to process other languages. It does it flawlessly, but a more direct solution might be a nice project.

    --
    http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
  2. Gibberish by SpinyNorman · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If you want to build computing into a utility, you need large real-time systems running as sufficiently as possible.

    But if you want to build sprockets into a weasel you need small batch-mode systems running as necessarily as possible.

    If the poster had anything interesting to say (I'd guess not, but who knows!), it was totally obscured by his lack of grasp of the English language.