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Erlang is as much of a platform as it is a (pretty peculiar) language and its functionality does overlaps with the operating system, for example thread manageme
by stiff 14y ago
Erlang is as much of a platform as it is a (pretty peculiar) language and its functionality does overlaps with the operating system, for example thread management (and in Erlang you tend to have thousands of threads as far as I understand) and things like being able to boot up Erlang on ten computers and have them behave like one big Erlang instance. In other words, considering what Erlang does, it seems plausible this is a very reasonable thing to try, I don't think this has to do with "operating system services" in the windowish sense of the word "service", it's more about conflicting approaches to same problems between the OS and Erlang.
- pi18n 14y agoI was thinking this also! The difference between Erlang and an OS seems like little more than device drivers. Moving BEAM into kernel-space would improve the speed of the thread switching and IPC. So Erlang is a particularly good language to try this with. Also I think this is a good idea in general. With cloud hosting, why run a full Linux OS if you are only going to run a webserver or database shard on it? If the OS could be replaced by a file manager and the runtime code of a single application (with some significant speedup), there are probably a bunch of companies that would be interested.