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Comment by seanhandley | Hacker News Reader

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seanhandley·

I wonder if WhatsApp could be considered the most successful user-facing application with an Erlang backend.

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What about its original purpose, which was telecoms infrastructure?

Oh, absolutely.

I framed it this way intentionally. Without a doubt the most successful Erlang apps are telecoms related.

Telecoms probably funded Erlang way more than WhatsApp did.

WhatsApp is basically modern SMS. That's sort of a telecom application.

Almost like Erlang was designed by a telecom company ....

Probably that's why they opted for Erlang.

What other candidates are there?

Facebook Messenger, if I remember correctly, was also originally authored in Erlang.

Discord also if I remember correctly?

Discord was written in Elixir! https://blog.discord.com/scaling-elixir-f9b8e1e7c29b

Does it mean it's technically also based on Erlang?

It runs on the Erlang BEAM virtual machine. But it’s very much it’s own language, and looks and feels very different to Erlang.

I would say the Elxir is based on Erlang about as much as Scala is based on Java.

while WhatsApp is the largest I am aware of (it's one of the leading platforms Worldwide anyway), there are quite a few, sometimes in the form of Elixir:

- Discord

- Pinterest

- Spotify

- Klarna

- Riot games (the messaging service)

- PepsiCo (for their billion making e-commerce)

- Toyota (for the connected platform)

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