UnixReview.com
December 2006

Reliably Multi-thread Calculations with Erlang

It's been a good year for Erlang, with:

• Technical advances such as the erlrt run-time installer and yaws Webserver,
• Social milestones like the 12th Erlang User Conference, with more than 140 attendees from four continents, and
• Collaborations like the 1.0 beta of the Comprehensive Erlang Active Network , planet erlang news service, and expansion of the gmane.comp.lang.erlang* newsgroups.

Most of the reasons are the same as when we wrote about Erlang four years ago: Erlang is particularly apt for development of high-reliability, high-performance applications. As a functional language, it also provides a good education in programming models and idioms that are sure to become more prominent in the near future.

Problems and opportunities in concurrency

There are also a couple of differences from 2002. Since that time, vendors including Intel and AMD have emphasized the capabilities of multi-core CPUs. They've have mixed success in this campaign, though, because existing operating systems and programming environments don't exploit on-chip parallelism well.