3 ms·

It's been a few years; has anyone had a contrary experience? E.g., a system with parallelism/concurrency that was reliable and faster than one built in Erlang?

macintux 4y ago
I don’t, but I will point out that finding a system that performs in parallel faster than Erlang wouldn’t be difficult. The BEAM is getting better/faster over the years, but it’ll never be as fast as the JVM, much less something closer to the metal.
aussiesnack 4y ago
I don't have empirical evidence (nor experience) to hand, but I doubt there's any shortage of individual systems that do some sort of parallel/concurrent work faster than Erlang systems, built on lower-level concurrency primitives offered on the JVM, in golang, Rust etc. More narrowly though, there is a candidate for a means of building systems from higher level, BEAM-like primitives with potential for greater performance than Erlang/Elixir - Lunatic (https://lunatic.solutions/ https://lunatic.solutions/). It is admittedly a kind of reimplementation of the BEAM, which maybe makes Virding's point. But it's not ad hoc.
narag 4y ago
I've seen two systems that deal with a huge volume of data where parallelism, speed and throughput were critical. One was a mobile network operator call billing system, the other one a stock exchange. First one was written in C, the second one I'm not certain, but my understanding is that it was C too.
valenterry 4y ago
I think you should differentiate between Erlang and BEAM. I've not used both except for toying, but while the BEAM looks really really cool, Erlang does not. I use Scala and I'm pretty darn sure that it is way above Erlang in almost any regard, especially for concurrency and parallelism. However, to get what BEAM offers on the JVM you have to go with Akka (which I used a lot) and I think Akka falls short of BEAM in some regards, especially debugging.

macintux 4y ago

I don’t, but I will point out that finding a system that performs in parallel faster than Erlang wouldn’t be difficult. The BEAM is getting better/faster over the years, but it’ll never be as fast as the JVM, much less something closer to the metal.

aussiesnack 4y ago

I don't have empirical evidence (nor experience) to hand, but I doubt there's any shortage of individual systems that do some sort of parallel/concurrent work faster than Erlang systems, built on lower-level concurrency primitives offered on the JVM, in golang, Rust etc. More narrowly though, there is a candidate for a means of building systems from higher level, BEAM-like primitives with potential for greater performance than Erlang/Elixir - Lunatic (https://lunatic.solutions/ https://lunatic.solutions/). It is admittedly a kind of reimplementation of the BEAM, which maybe makes Virding's point. But it's not ad hoc.

narag 4y ago

I've seen two systems that deal with a huge volume of data where parallelism, speed and throughput were critical. One was a mobile network operator call billing system, the other one a stock exchange. First one was written in C, the second one I'm not certain, but my understanding is that it was C too.

valenterry 4y ago

I think you should differentiate between Erlang and BEAM. I've not used both except for toying, but while the BEAM looks really really cool, Erlang does not. I use Scala and I'm pretty darn sure that it is way above Erlang in almost any regard, especially for concurrency and parallelism. However, to get what BEAM offers on the JVM you have to go with Akka (which I used a lot) and I think Akka falls short of BEAM in some regards, especially debugging.