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Erlang has a great concurrency model with higher overhead than Rust, but similar cross thread safety, doesn’t do anything about exterior resources to the applic

Erlang has a great concurrency model with higher overhead than Rust, but similar cross thread safety, doesn’t do anything about exterior resources to the application. I’ve not worked with Coyote, but if it is the system for .net, it describes itself as a framework, “Coyote provides developers a programming framework for confidently building reliable asynchronous software on the .NET platform”. Orleans similarly describes itself as a framework, “Orleans is a cross-platform software framework for building scalable and robust distributed interactive applications based on the .NET Framework.” Rust is a language, similar frameworks are being built with it, the point your making does not appear to be about the language.

zelphirkalt 6y ago
If I understand correctly, the Erlang point was, that you can have a distributed system by using Beam to scale to multiple machines and have them communicate via message passing, which is all possible and encouraged, because of how you structure and write code in Erlang, as actors with mailboxes, isolating actors from each other, except for the messages, that are passed. You say, that the Erlang concurrency model has higher overhead than Rust. In Rust there are probably multiple projects going on right now (one of them is Bastion, but I guess there are probably others), which try to provide Erlang like concurrency. What do you mean by overhead of a concurrency model (that of Erlang) being higher than the overhead a programming language (Rust)? As far as I know Erlang's lightweight processes are about as lightweight as you can get. Is there a Rust framework for Erlang like concurrency, which reduces the footprint of lightweight processes even more?
- bluejekyll 6y ago
  That wasn’t meant to be a snide comment about Erlang in any way. All I meant by the comment about higher-overhead was that the language itself generally has more costs to run, i.e. runtime, memory usage, garbage collector, interpreted, etc, than Rust. The “process” model of Erlang is about as lightweight as you can get, agreed. In terms of capabilities of beam across systems, point taken. Though we start stretching some of the understanding of where languages end and runtimes begin... Rust and C make those boundaries a little more clear.

zelphirkalt 6y ago

If I understand correctly, the Erlang point was, that you can have a distributed system by using Beam to scale to multiple machines and have them communicate via message passing, which is all possible and encouraged, because of how you structure and write code in Erlang, as actors with mailboxes, isolating actors from each other, except for the messages, that are passed. You say, that the Erlang concurrency model has higher overhead than Rust. In Rust there are probably multiple projects going on right now (one of them is Bastion, but I guess there are probably others), which try to provide Erlang like concurrency. What do you mean by overhead of a concurrency model (that of Erlang) being higher than the overhead a programming language (Rust)? As far as I know Erlang's lightweight processes are about as lightweight as you can get. Is there a Rust framework for Erlang like concurrency, which reduces the footprint of lightweight processes even more?

bluejekyll 6y ago
That wasn’t meant to be a snide comment about Erlang in any way. All I meant by the comment about higher-overhead was that the language itself generally has more costs to run, i.e. runtime, memory usage, garbage collector, interpreted, etc, than Rust. The “process” model of Erlang is about as lightweight as you can get, agreed. In terms of capabilities of beam across systems, point taken. Though we start stretching some of the understanding of where languages end and runtimes begin... Rust and C make those boundaries a little more clear.