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While Erlang is great, it is certainly not a systems programming language, it requires a really complex runtime/vm, and it is not related to C in any way (and m
by uriel 17y ago
While Erlang is great, it is certainly not a systems programming language, it requires a really complex runtime/vm, and it is not related to C in any way (and many of us still love C, and are happy to see a language to fixes its shortcomings).
One could (and some are planning to) write a kernel in Go, doing the same in Erlang would be much harder, if possible at all.
- stcredzero 17y agoOne thing a lot of people forget, is how much memory overhead is involved with modern languages like Erlang. (Python and Ruby are bad in this regard as well.) Smalltalk was heavily criticized in its day for this, yet "modern" languages are just as bad or several times worse. Now Smalltalk and Lisp have both been used for "systems programming" -- years ago, on much older hardware. One can just live with the overhead. Go looks like it would have C-like memory overhead, so perhaps it is a much better choice in this regard?
- malkia 17y agoLisp was used (Symbolics), but the machine had specialized instructions dealing better with gc, and object dispatching (was it Flavors, Symbolics pre-CLOS OO system). For example (have to google for the document), a method dispatch on then comparable cpu's was 1000 microseconds vs 3.5 ms for Symbolics machine, due to the specialized instruction set. Symbolics went so crazy, that it developed every HW piece being used - including monitors & printers :) That to be said I love Common Lisp :)
- stcredzero 17y agoA friend of mine has a Lisp machine sitting in his living room. It (the hardware) runs about half the time. He occasionally has to go in and fix the thing. Software looks old, but can still impress!