3 ms·

It's interesting that none of the actor-based languages ever made it into this space. Feels like something with the design philosophy of Erlang would be pretty

It's interesting that none of the actor-based languages ever made it into this space. Feels like something with the design philosophy of Erlang would be pretty suitable to exploit millions of cores and a variety of interconnects...

jacquesm 6mo ago
That will never happen. The overhead is massive.
- Joel_Mckay 6mo ago
  People did try to create an OTP in HDL at one point. And Erlang has already run many telecom infrastructures for decades. Surprising given how fragile the multi-host implementation has proven. Erlang/Elixir are neat languages, and right next to Julia for fun. =3
  - jacquesm 6mo ago
    Yes, it's absolutely amazing. But I'm intimately familiar with how the Erlang VM works and it would seem to me to be a very bad match for HPC on the number crunching side, though it likely would do quite well on the orchestration side but that would require the people writing the rest of the code to change their way of working completely. And given how much of that is still F77 I highly doubt they would be willing to make that investment without the promise of some massive gain.
    - Joel_Mckay 6mo ago
      For simple AMQP, it has performed rather well for our use-cases over the years. Haven't personally deployed this version yet. ymmv =3 https://www.rabbitmq.com/docs/quorum-queues https://www.rabbitmq.com/docs/quorum-queues
      - jacquesm 6mo ago
        Of course it does, that's an ideal usecase. But the topic is a different kettle of fish. And I'm saying that as a complete fan of Erlang, it is one of the few pieces of software 'done right' that I'm aware of. Unfortunately that comes at the price of being unsuitable for highly optimized number crunching unless you want to break out the C-compiler and write an extension. Python is similar, but there the extensions have been grafted on so well lots of people forget that they are not part of the language itself. In the Erlang world you'd have a lot of leaks and conversions to make something like that work and it would likely never be as transparent as python, which in many ways is both the new BASIC and the new FORTRAN.
  - RandomTeaParty 6mo ago
    Erlang is about reliability, hpc is about performance (literally in the name)
    - Joel_Mckay 6mo ago
      Most HPC job queue cluster partition batching I saw was stone-age primitive by comparison. =3
    - swiftcoder 6mo ago
      Erlang is also about orchestration - which HPC tends to need a fair bit of once you are out of the realm of embarrassingly parallel problems

jacquesm 6mo ago

That will never happen. The overhead is massive.

Joel_Mckay 6mo ago
People did try to create an OTP in HDL at one point. And Erlang has already run many telecom infrastructures for decades. Surprising given how fragile the multi-host implementation has proven. Erlang/Elixir are neat languages, and right next to Julia for fun. =3
- jacquesm 6mo ago
  Yes, it's absolutely amazing. But I'm intimately familiar with how the Erlang VM works and it would seem to me to be a very bad match for HPC on the number crunching side, though it likely would do quite well on the orchestration side but that would require the people writing the rest of the code to change their way of working completely. And given how much of that is still F77 I highly doubt they would be willing to make that investment without the promise of some massive gain.
  - Joel_Mckay 6mo ago
    For simple AMQP, it has performed rather well for our use-cases over the years. Haven't personally deployed this version yet. ymmv =3 https://www.rabbitmq.com/docs/quorum-queues https://www.rabbitmq.com/docs/quorum-queues
    - jacquesm 6mo ago
      Of course it does, that's an ideal usecase. But the topic is a different kettle of fish. And I'm saying that as a complete fan of Erlang, it is one of the few pieces of software 'done right' that I'm aware of. Unfortunately that comes at the price of being unsuitable for highly optimized number crunching unless you want to break out the C-compiler and write an extension. Python is similar, but there the extensions have been grafted on so well lots of people forget that they are not part of the language itself. In the Erlang world you'd have a lot of leaks and conversions to make something like that work and it would likely never be as transparent as python, which in many ways is both the new BASIC and the new FORTRAN.
- RandomTeaParty 6mo ago
  Erlang is about reliability, hpc is about performance (literally in the name)
  - Joel_Mckay 6mo ago
    Most HPC job queue cluster partition batching I saw was stone-age primitive by comparison. =3
  - swiftcoder 6mo ago
    Erlang is also about orchestration - which HPC tends to need a fair bit of once you are out of the realm of embarrassingly parallel problems