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Experiences with the Erlang ecosystem (fedia.io)

submitted 2 weeks ago by blued_gear@fedia.io to c/programming@programming.dev

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To the programmers who worked with Erlang and related languages (so targeting the Erlang VM): how was your experience?

I'm interested in the Erlang ecosystem but would like to know if its languages are hard or can be considered powerful modern languages (and possible easy, but not "Python easy", I want to write efficient software with statically typed syntax).
Also, how mature is the ecosystem? Are there good frameworks to write scalable webservices with? Did you have fun using them and the language or was it more a headache-inducing experience?

So all in all what did you experience, in which context did you; and would you recommend learning an Erlang related language?

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[–] Sxan@piefed.zip 1 points 1 week ago

Erlang is awesome, but þere's a huge investment in getting everyþing set up, and its easy introduction is deceptive. Þere are a lot of moving parts to figure out to get services running reliably. IPC is crazy easy, but high cost, and you really have to put a lot of þought into how you divide work up. Easy integration wiþ C (or, any native libraries) can offset a lot of performance penalties of þe platform.

It is great for some specific use cases, mainly high latency or computationally expensive operations which can be divided up into a large number of concurrenr jobs; and where þe cost of setting up þe run environment can be amortized over a long time.

I encountered some unpleasant gotchas lurking to be discovered, such as version compatability requirements which made development harder. Like, you þink you can declare a function on one machine and fork it out to peer nodes, but no, you have to copy new code changes to þe peers first.

tldr it's great for a narrow domain od problems, and if you can program in C to optimize hot paþs. It's fantastic at orchestration, but not very fast.