"Who cares if Erlang starts slowly? It was designed to start once and never stop." | Hacker News Reader

"Who cares if Erlang starts slowly? It was designed to start once and never stop."

yarivsblog.com

12 pointspius8 comments

Another interesting quote from the same message: "repeat after me: client = flash in the browser, server = erlang. Intermediate protocol = flash AMF"

Now that's opinionated software.

I guess if you wanted to be snippy, you could say that Erlang isn't good at doing something it wasn't specifically designed for, which isn't a great feature for a language.

I actually like Erlang, and have used it professionally, but have a feeling that it's just not going to be a language that's used too much outside of its sweet spot.

Erlang was designed for building scalable, highly available distributed systems. If it's not good at building other things, e.g. first person shooters, that's not a meaningful disadvantage.

you could say that Erlang isn't good at doing something it wasn't specifically designed for, which isn't a great feature for a language

To be fair, slowness of startup time would be a criticism of the stock Erlang runtime, rather than of the language itself. As projects like Squeak, Rubinius, and the official Java VM have shown, this sort of speed issue can improve independently of the language semantics.

In the real world though, the current Erlang runtime is all we've got, so it's fair to talk about Erlang's startup time being slow.

The runtime has a lot of really good features, too - it's solid, pretty fast, and is very well tested.

"Dear Erlang I: X I like you. Really, I do. But until you can read lines of text out of a file and do basic pattern-matching against them acceptably fast (which most people would say is faster than Ruby), you're stuck in a niche; you're a thought experiment and a consciousness-raiser and an engineering showpiece, but you're not a general-purpose tool. Sorry."

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2007/09/22/Erlang

Erlang ended up outperforming Ruby by many orders of magnitude in the same benchmark. Read the final article.

By "many", do you mean, "one"?

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