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Noticing that languages built on the Erlang VM seem to be more along the lines of "an X-like on the Erlang VM" instead of "X on the Erlang VM" (like JRuby, Iron
by ConstantineXVI 14y ago
Noticing that languages built on the Erlang VM seem to be more along the lines of "an X-like on the Erlang VM" instead of "X on the Erlang VM" (like JRuby, IronPython, ClojureScript). Is Erlang's VM less adaptable to existing languages vs. the JVM, etc.?
- chc 14y agoThat's part of it, but it's also just that there's little motivation for using it as a general-purpose VM. Building a precise clone of Python on the Erlang VM would be more difficult than on JVM, but more importantly, it would be pointless — Python does not have the kind of deep-rooted concurrency semantics that are Erlang's raison d'etre. If you try to stick an existing language that doesn't closely resemble Erlang on the Erlang VM, all you're doing is creating a really awkward implementation of that language and not really gaining anything. So you end up with languages that are similar to X but with a huge transfusion of Erlang's semantics so that they're useful.