4 ms·

As a systems Erlang designer who worked for 2 of the biggest Erlang companies in the market, I can assure you that Erlang/OTP is not some magic pixie dust that

by h91wka 6y ago

As a systems Erlang designer who worked for 2 of the biggest Erlang companies in the market, I can assure you that Erlang/OTP is not some magic pixie dust that suddenly makes all the distributed systems problems go away. Playing is one thing, making a reliable, fault-tolerant system is another. OTP doesn't give you _state of art_ distributed consensus algorithms out of the box.

ignoramous 6y ago
AWS built simple-db with Erlang [0] but then seemingly haven't been using it much ever since... I wouldn't be surprised if simple-db has since been moved to aurora (like document-db [1], neptune, and timestream) or dynamo-db [2] behind the scenes? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_SimpleDB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_SimpleDB [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18869755 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18869755 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18871854 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18871854
- rubiquity 6y ago
  Disclaimer: Former Erlanger, currently at AWS but these are disjoint properties. I’ve never worked on SimpleDB or even looked at it, but I think one lesson several database creators learned is that Erlang isn’t high throughout enough for certain classes of database systems. Especially with the last decade’s trend of making potential adoption of a given database as wide as possible and how important benchmarks are for marketing. I still think Erlang is wonderful for writing control plane type software, given the culture around using FSM-like structures.
  - ignoramous 6y ago
    > Erlang isn’t high throughout enough for certain classes of database systems. Interestingly, one of the early simple-db engineers, James Larson [0], later built Megastore [1] at Google, which seems a lot like a retake of simple-db, and a predecessor to Google F1 [2]. I wonder if Megastore uses Erlang. [0] https://www.linkedin.com/in/jilarson https://www.linkedin.com/in/jilarson [1] https://research.google/pubs/pub36971/ https://research.google/pubs/pub36971/ [2] https://research.google/pubs/pub41344/ https://research.google/pubs/pub41344/
di4na 6y ago
I meant about the debugging tools that OTP ship with. There is nothing in this about messages or function tracing dynamically. Even less about the kind of introspection you get with it. I totally agree with your points, i am just pointing that it seems they do not seem to know that this kind of tooling are even possible.
eeZah7Ux 6y ago
> OTP doesn't give you _state of art_ distributed consensus algorithms out of the box. Correct. Yet people love to think it does.

by h91wka 6y ago

ignoramous 6y ago

AWS built simple-db with Erlang [0] but then seemingly haven't been using it much ever since... I wouldn't be surprised if simple-db has since been moved to aurora (like document-db [1], neptune, and timestream) or dynamo-db [2] behind the scenes? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_SimpleDB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_SimpleDB [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18869755 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18869755 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18871854 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18871854

rubiquity 6y ago
Disclaimer: Former Erlanger, currently at AWS but these are disjoint properties. I’ve never worked on SimpleDB or even looked at it, but I think one lesson several database creators learned is that Erlang isn’t high throughout enough for certain classes of database systems. Especially with the last decade’s trend of making potential adoption of a given database as wide as possible and how important benchmarks are for marketing. I still think Erlang is wonderful for writing control plane type software, given the culture around using FSM-like structures.
- ignoramous 6y ago
  > Erlang isn’t high throughout enough for certain classes of database systems. Interestingly, one of the early simple-db engineers, James Larson [0], later built Megastore [1] at Google, which seems a lot like a retake of simple-db, and a predecessor to Google F1 [2]. I wonder if Megastore uses Erlang. [0] https://www.linkedin.com/in/jilarson https://www.linkedin.com/in/jilarson [1] https://research.google/pubs/pub36971/ https://research.google/pubs/pub36971/ [2] https://research.google/pubs/pub41344/ https://research.google/pubs/pub41344/

di4na 6y ago

I meant about the debugging tools that OTP ship with. There is nothing in this about messages or function tracing dynamically. Even less about the kind of introspection you get with it. I totally agree with your points, i am just pointing that it seems they do not seem to know that this kind of tooling are even possible.

eeZah7Ux 6y ago

> OTP doesn't give you _state of art_ distributed consensus algorithms out of the box. Correct. Yet people love to think it does.