3 ms·

This is a wild take. It's one thing to criticise the BEAM for things it's bad at, it's another to criticise it for the thing it absolutely excels at. The BEAM

by troad 1y ago

This is a wild take. It's one thing to criticise the BEAM for things it's bad at, it's another to criticise it for the thing it absolutely excels at. The BEAM is built around passing immutable messages between cheap green threads, watched over by resilient supervisor trees. This means no data races (immutability), no hung threads (supervisor trees), no boilerplate (all of this is built in). The performance is surprisingly good, since mandatory immutability permits reference-based optimisations (copying, passing, etc). The BEAM is, in fact, the perfect platform for the exact use case you describe - fault-tolerant, distributed/concurrent systems.

giancarlostoro 1y ago
Not only does it do this all very safely, it uses the absolute most minimal of memory to achieve this. This video from 9 years ago... 1 million people in 1 chatroom, on a server with 40+ cores and 128GB of memory, one single physical server, it used up about 30 GB of memory. Show me a language that can do this efficiently. In under a second it went to a million different connections. The cores didn't spin up to grind hardcore, none of that. Just efficient lightweight processes running. This isn't even on "raw Erlang" its on Elixir -> BEAM which is impressive on its own in my eyes. I would love to see equivalent videos on similar hardware today in other languages. ;) Please by all mean, show me your JVM application that can handle this. I also love that he thinks all those languages that are a decade (and decades) younger than the BEAM which has been in production since 1992 are more production ready and tested. I don't think he realizes the origin story to Erlang whatsoever, it was 100% built to be used in production for a major telecoms provider. https://youtu.be/N4Duii6Yog0 https://youtu.be/N4Duii6Yog0
- giancarlostoro 1y ago
  I said BEAM has been in prod since 1992 but I meant OTP. BEAM is even older... Erlang goes back to the 80s.

by troad 1y ago

giancarlostoro 1y ago

Not only does it do this all very safely, it uses the absolute most minimal of memory to achieve this. This video from 9 years ago... 1 million people in 1 chatroom, on a server with 40+ cores and 128GB of memory, one single physical server, it used up about 30 GB of memory. Show me a language that can do this efficiently. In under a second it went to a million different connections. The cores didn't spin up to grind hardcore, none of that. Just efficient lightweight processes running. This isn't even on "raw Erlang" its on Elixir -> BEAM which is impressive on its own in my eyes. I would love to see equivalent videos on similar hardware today in other languages. ;) Please by all mean, show me your JVM application that can handle this. I also love that he thinks all those languages that are a decade (and decades) younger than the BEAM which has been in production since 1992 are more production ready and tested. I don't think he realizes the origin story to Erlang whatsoever, it was 100% built to be used in production for a major telecoms provider. https://youtu.be/N4Duii6Yog0 https://youtu.be/N4Duii6Yog0

giancarlostoro 1y ago
I said BEAM has been in prod since 1992 but I meant OTP. BEAM is even older... Erlang goes back to the 80s.