I’m fascinated by the sound of Erlang/BEAM but I’ve never found the time to actually try it. How are people using it in production? Do you write all your service logic using it or delegate specific parts to it?
This approach is notably not making proper or really any use of OTP features, but it was an extremely easy way to adopt a safe, fast, functional language for number-crunching workflows while continuing to lean on Rails for everything else its great at: web interfaces, HTTP APIs, etc.
Rails is basically the configuration tool for the various inputs of a job, and job is passed to Gleam via Redis as an atomic set of config inputs to be used when processing a dataset (usually big CSV files streamed from object storage). We use a very thin Elixir wrapper to do all network and file IO etc, Gleam modules are pure business logic called from Elixir.
Some day soon, I'm going to try and write up a longer technical article about this approach... it comes up surprisingly often in HN conversations.
If we encounter row-level errors in a batch, we log those alongside the outputs. There's nothing particularly intrinsic about out usage of Gleam that prevents the workers from crashing during processing, its all about having error handling set up within the job itself to avoid killing the process or pod running it.
It is an excellent general purpose language that succeeds in a lot of domains.
Check out my conversation from Developer Voices for more info