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Utilizing multiple processor cores was something of an afterthought, IIRC. Initially, the Erlang VM only used a single CPU, and in order to utilize multiple CPU
by krylon 11y ago
Utilizing multiple processor cores was something of an afterthought, IIRC. Initially, the Erlang VM only used a single CPU, and in order to utilize multiple CPUs, one had to start one Erlang VM per CPU/core.
One of the nice things about Erlang's general approach is that this was a lot less painful than in many other languages. (I have no idea, though, how much work it was to get the Erlang VM itself to use multiple threads.)
- giancarlostoro 11y agoI always assumed it was one of the main benefits of Erlang since the beginning, back when I tried to attempt to learn Erlang years ago it was one of the main things I learned about it. I've yet to really get down into Erlang since then though.
- krylon 11y agoFWIW, I think Erlang gained SMP-support at least ten years ago. And running multiple Erlang VMs on one machine - from the Erlang application's perspective - is no different from running them on several machines. The really nice thing about Erlang is that it scales across multiple nodes very smoothly.