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Comment by cageface | Hacker News Reader

The Kotlin KTOR framework is the most promising new web stack I’ve seen. It doesn’t have the higher level runtime features of Erlang but it checks most of your other boxes.

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I like Kotlin but I'd say a strength of BEAM is that it doesn't allow for infinite loops, which means coroutines can't block others. This is a fundamental strength.

It allows the runtime to schedule coroutines effectively - they can't block for more than a function call (recursion is how you do "infinite" loops).

I think a future competitor to BEAM languages would need this feature.

This is the kind of thing I was referring to by higher level runtime features in Erlang. If you really need this sort of thing then you should probably be looking at an Erlang stack but I think for a lot of projects a less exotic and also much more rigorously typed language is going to be more productive.

What do you mean "more productive"? You'll get your code out to prod way faster in a BEAM language and in my experience the only remaining errors are relatively minor and easy to "wait to fix", because the BEAM will keep on keeping on and there's no user facing effect (maybe your error logs are a bit polluted with them). Whole classes of errors are not even possible because of "copy-on-write" function passing. I recently fixed a code bug that tripped during a race condition entangleing with a blocking call across two datacenters 1000 miles apart in about one hour, because you can introspect literally everything in the vm with very little hassle, and IO writes are atomic (if you call an IO write to screen it will never be interrupted by another IO write to screen).

I call that productivity.

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