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I wonder about a language like Elixir in the age of serverless. Erlang will always be great at the use-case it was originally written for (and what Whats App us
by Touche 8y ago
I wonder about a language like Elixir in the age of serverless. Erlang will always be great at the use-case it was originally written for (and what Whats App uses it for), but that's not the scale that most startups operate in.
With serverless the advantages that Erlang has don't matter much, since the process doesn't live along to utilize them. Instead the bottleneck is cold start times. So these types of languages (including Java) that are meant to start and stay running for a long time aren't a great fit. Go, Rust, possibly Pony, are better fits. Even Node isn't a superb choice, cold starts can be slow because of loading so many files.
- qaq 8y agoYou do realize that outside of cloud providers hype "serverless" is a tiny fraction of cloud use let alone overall use.
- Touche 8y agoSome times hype is warranted. Get passed it and look at the actual technology and its value. If you are building a website in 2018 you are doing yourself a disservice manually managing servers.
- qaq 8y agoat our scale if we used "serverless" our AWS bill would go from several mil a month to 20+ mil. plus
- Touche 8y agoYou're not a startup.
- qaq 8y agoIsn't a goal of startup to grow? You lock yourself into a model where you compute spend is 10X that of your competitors you not gonna get very far.
- Touche 8y agoAt a certain scale using cloud services at all is too expensive. At a certain scale you write your own databases. You make your own chips.
- philwelch 8y agoAt your scale, you could take a "serverless" application and just deploy it across managed containers, which is how "serverless" infrastructure seems to work to begin with.
- tylerhou 8y agohttp://erlangonxen.org/zerg http://erlangonxen.org/zerg Seems to be down at the moment, but here's some previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5243360 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5243360
- karmajunkie 8y agoIt might be down because the project is pretty much dead at this point. Ling hasn't seen a commit in 3+ years.