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Erlang Performance Lab

116 points by iamd3vil 10y ago

cyberpunk 10y ago
This looks very pretty from the screenshots and kudos for throwing out out there so apparently soon in its development; I might check it out (Erlanger here) but I would really like a better idea of what this thing does or some actual docs? Download link is a .gz and the getting started page goes nowhere really? When you make tools for developers, the really important bit is communicating why this thing is useful, and then how to use it right? Love to see Erlanger tools and I'll be following you, but this seems a smidge immature.... How does it work out network use? Does it depend on certain behaviours? Does it simply make pretty things from trace?
- arkgil 10y ago
  Thank you for the feedback! Looking at all the comments here, we will definitely look into improving documentation. As for network traffic, we use net_kernel module which allows to track throughput between nodes in the cluster. It doesn't rely on specifics you system.
allanmacgregor 10y ago
Really cool! But needs more documentation
dmix 10y ago
This is great. I'm going to play around with it for an Elixir project. I'd just like to say I found the homepage did a very good job of explaining the product. Good screenshots and well written summaries of each feature/benefit. Edit: seconding the call for documentation. Also maybe a link to Getting Started at the top, that's seems like where I'd start vs downloading a .tar.gz without instructions.
thecity2 10y ago
I wish someone would port Python to BEAM. I'm actually surprised there isn't a project out there, except some really old stale project called beam.py I found on github, which hasn't been worked on since 2010.
- cyberpunk 10y ago
  Why would that make sense? The gains you get for free using otp and the beam vm depend heavily around language integration of vm features. Porting python to a vm it would work slowly on and would be unable to use most of, if not all of, the benefits without changing the language would give you what exactly?
  - 35bge57dtjku 10y ago
    No more GIL problems? What couldn't you do, say by making BEAM/OTP -specific features be a library you import in Python, and by mapping Python language features to however Erlang does them? I get there will likely be problems, but what specific problems would you run in to?
    - cyberpunk 10y ago
      I'm not going to get too into this as I hope most readers understand why this couldn't work without needing much depth.... Python has no concept of a process like Erlang does. The standard library does even know about, let alone is able to deal with, the difference between cast and call messages. It can't do messages even. There is no way to translate monitors vs links. What's a node? ..... You could implement python syntax maybe, but python will never make sense on beam.
      - 35bge57dtjku 10y ago
        You can't accomplish all of that by making users import a library to use those things, like I said? Or at least enough of it to make it reasonably useful as a Python?
        cyberpunk 10y ago
        Not really. Erlang/OTP applications get the advantages they have by being what they are and that's not really something you can import as a library to a language which doesn't even have primitives those systems speak. If it sounds like a good idea to do that when you are solving something horrible, then your better bet is to write that functionality in a beam language instead of trying to play beam in a language which can't do it. This is a bit of a different world than most of us are used to. Porting python to the jvm or making it run on v8 are different goals than making something play in the beam space. You could run single node python with a port to beam, but there would be no advantages to doing it. It would be slower and no one would use it. Beam langauges only get you something when you're doing distributed things really and python isn't equipped for playing those natively. You could wrap it in some libs maybe, sure. But why would you?
iamd3vil 10y ago
I think this talk at Erlang & Elixir factory SF 2017 gives more insight into this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncedupb-Rqw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncedupb-Rqw
Quanttek 10y ago
That looks extremely useful! On a side note: One thing that always annoyed me about Erlanger is it's lackluster documentation, specifically browsing the docs. Amy efforts to improve that?
spockz 10y ago
It would be amazing if we can have this for Akka as well! I realise Akka doesn't have the benefit of beam/otp, but the data itself should be pretty easy to come by.
baransu 10y ago
Thank you for checking out Erlang Performance Lab. We have better documentation on our github repo page: https://github.com/erlanglab/erlangpl https://github.com/erlanglab/erlangpl

116 points by iamd3vil 10y ago

This looks very pretty from the screenshots and kudos for throwing out out there so apparently soon in its development; I might check it out (Erlanger here) but I would really like a better idea of what this thing does or some actual docs? Download link is a .gz and the getting started page goes nowhere really? When you make tools for developers, the really important bit is communicating why this thing is useful, and then how to use it right? Love to see Erlanger tools and I'll be following you, but this seems a smidge immature.... How does it work out network use? Does it depend on certain behaviours? Does it simply make pretty things from trace?

arkgil 10y ago
Thank you for the feedback! Looking at all the comments here, we will definitely look into improving documentation. As for network traffic, we use net_kernel module which allows to track throughput between nodes in the cluster. It doesn't rely on specifics you system.

allanmacgregor 10y ago

Really cool! But needs more documentation

dmix 10y ago

This is great. I'm going to play around with it for an Elixir project. I'd just like to say I found the homepage did a very good job of explaining the product. Good screenshots and well written summaries of each feature/benefit. Edit: seconding the call for documentation. Also maybe a link to Getting Started at the top, that's seems like where I'd start vs downloading a .tar.gz without instructions.

thecity2 10y ago

I wish someone would port Python to BEAM. I'm actually surprised there isn't a project out there, except some really old stale project called beam.py I found on github, which hasn't been worked on since 2010.

cyberpunk 10y ago
Why would that make sense? The gains you get for free using otp and the beam vm depend heavily around language integration of vm features. Porting python to a vm it would work slowly on and would be unable to use most of, if not all of, the benefits without changing the language would give you what exactly?
- 35bge57dtjku 10y ago
  No more GIL problems? What couldn't you do, say by making BEAM/OTP -specific features be a library you import in Python, and by mapping Python language features to however Erlang does them? I get there will likely be problems, but what specific problems would you run in to?
  - cyberpunk 10y ago
    I'm not going to get too into this as I hope most readers understand why this couldn't work without needing much depth.... Python has no concept of a process like Erlang does. The standard library does even know about, let alone is able to deal with, the difference between cast and call messages. It can't do messages even. There is no way to translate monitors vs links. What's a node? ..... You could implement python syntax maybe, but python will never make sense on beam.
    - 35bge57dtjku 10y ago
      You can't accomplish all of that by making users import a library to use those things, like I said? Or at least enough of it to make it reasonably useful as a Python?
      - cyberpunk 10y ago
        Not really. Erlang/OTP applications get the advantages they have by being what they are and that's not really something you can import as a library to a language which doesn't even have primitives those systems speak. If it sounds like a good idea to do that when you are solving something horrible, then your better bet is to write that functionality in a beam language instead of trying to play beam in a language which can't do it. This is a bit of a different world than most of us are used to. Porting python to the jvm or making it run on v8 are different goals than making something play in the beam space. You could run single node python with a port to beam, but there would be no advantages to doing it. It would be slower and no one would use it. Beam langauges only get you something when you're doing distributed things really and python isn't equipped for playing those natively. You could wrap it in some libs maybe, sure. But why would you?

iamd3vil 10y ago

I think this talk at Erlang & Elixir factory SF 2017 gives more insight into this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncedupb-Rqw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncedupb-Rqw

Quanttek 10y ago

That looks extremely useful! On a side note: One thing that always annoyed me about Erlanger is it's lackluster documentation, specifically browsing the docs. Amy efforts to improve that?

spockz 10y ago

It would be amazing if we can have this for Akka as well! I realise Akka doesn't have the benefit of beam/otp, but the data itself should be pretty easy to come by.

baransu 10y ago

Thank you for checking out Erlang Performance Lab. We have better documentation on our github repo page: https://github.com/erlanglab/erlangpl https://github.com/erlanglab/erlangpl