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deno, I was wondering, if so similar to erlang, why not use erlang instead C? What is the major drawback, footprint?
by thepumpkin1979 14y ago
deno, I was wondering, if so similar to erlang, why not use erlang instead C? What is the major drawback, footprint?
- sausagefeet 14y agoHard realtime and control over memory allocation. Also, Erlang is not necessarily great when it comes to static analysis.
- deno 14y agoI’m not the author, so let me quote: > It turns out that many of the traits of Erlang systems overlap with that of the Rovers. But I don't think this is a coincidence. The software has certain different properties — the rovers are hard realtime whereas the erlang systems are soft realtime. > The things that do not overlap has to do with the need of having soft realtime vs hard realtime. In Erlang we can yield service. It is bad, but we can do it. On a rover it can be disastrous. Especially in the flight control software. Fire a rocket too late and you are in trouble.
- malkia 14y agoThe OTP virtual machine takes a lot of memory. It's an interpretter, which means much slower execution, as article and others above pointed - The Erlang VM is soft-realtime, it can't guarantee that something would finish in certain amount of micro or milliseconds, or if it does guarantee - it's too much for what they need (just guessing here). But the concepts are very similar - message passing being the way to communicate between modules, rather than shared memory ways. This brings another topic - the Linux vs Minix debate :) - I guess there are right things to be done for the right time, and right target. It's just getting all these things right is the hardest.
- deno 14y ago> It's an interpretter, which means much slower execution Only BEAM is an interpreter, there are HiPE and ErlLLVM backends as well. You can also write NIFs — functions in C that can be executed within VM.
- thepumpkin1979 14y agoWhy the downvote?