Erlang
Erlang
Posted Sep 30, 2007 20:39 UTC (Sun) by NAR (subscriber, #1313)In reply to: Erlang by davidw
Parent article: High-performance network programming, Part 1 (developerWorks)
I think that the Erlang virtual machine is a really nice piece of engineering: online code upgrade, node-transparent message passing, hundreds of thousands of processes, etc. On the other hand, the language itself looks like it was designed in the sixties, before C was invented. Even a basic construct like the record (struct in C) is an afterthought in the language, not to mention that there is no proper "if" statement in the language.
As someone mentioned recently on the erlang-questions list, Erlang was designed to implement one partical product of one particular company. To this day this product (and its decendants) are the driving force behind the language. One consequence is the standard library of Erlang: OTP. I guess it contains one of the very few free GCP/Megaco implementations (because it's needed by that particular product), but the regexp library or file I/O is not that good in the library (not to mention the graphical library, which is - according to the rumours - was developed as a homework by a university student, and is really far from the likes of Swing for Java or QT for C++).
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