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Questions tagged [erlang]

A functional programming language that is well suited for distributed, concurrent, and fault-tolerant applications.

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When is it NOT good to use actors in akka/erlang?

I've been working with akka for 7-8 months now daily. When I started, I would be working on applications and notice that actors would be used basically anywhere once inside the actor system for communicating between most objects. So I did the same -…
JasonG
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Learning Erlang vs learning node.js

I see a lot of crap online about how Erlang kicks node.js' ass in just about every conceivable category. So I'd like to learn Erlang, and give it a shot, but here's the problem. I'm finding that I have a much harder time picking up Erlang than I…
Noli
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When would you need "hundreds of thousands" of threads?

Erlang, Go, and Rust all claim in one way or another that they support concurrent programming with cheap "threads"/coroutines. The Go FAQ states: It is practical to create hundreds of thousands of goroutines in the same address space. The Rust…
user39019
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Haskell vs Erlang for web services

I am looking to start an experimental project using a functional language and am trying to decide beween Erlang and Haskell, and both have some points that I really like. I like Haskell's strong type system and purity. I have a feeling it will…
Zachary K
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Is Erlang really an actor model language?

I was reading this article: http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~nd/surprise_97/journal/vol2/pjm2/ And it mentions that: ...in the actor model even an integer is represented as an actor... Wikipedia confirms: The Actor model adopts the philosophy that…
Den
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F# performance vs Erlang performance, is there proof the Erlang's VM is faster?

I've been putting time into learning functional programming and I've come to the part where I want to start writing a project instead of just dabbling in tutorials/examples. While doing my research, I've found that Erlang seems to be a pretty…
afuzzyllama
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Erlang and Go concurrent programming, objective differences between CSP and Actors?

I was looking into concurrent programming in Erlang and Go programming languages. As per my finding they are used Actor model and CSP respectively. But still I am confused with what are the objective differences between CSP and Actors? is it just…
nish1013
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What are your thoughts about the Actor Model?

The Actor Model which is used by Erlang seems to be a very different way to do concurrent programming. What are your thoughts about the Actor Model? Will it be a popular solution for concurrency?
Jonas
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Side effect-free interface on top of a stateful library

In an interview with John Hughes where he talks about Erlang and Haskell, he has the following to say about using stateful libraries in Erlang: If I want to use a stateful library, I usually build a side effect-free interface on top of it so that…
beta
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Erlang web frameworks survey

(Inspired by similar question on Haskel) There are several web frameworks for Erlang like Nitrogen, Chicago Boss, and Zotonic, and a few more. In what aspects do they differ from each other? For example: features (e.g. server only, or also client…
Zachary K
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Introducing functional programming into your development environment

This is a long story but I will try to summarize it as best I can. We are a .NET shop that writes software for a variety of different types of funds. For example, we write health claims management software, pension management software, 401(k)…
Nodey The Node Guy
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In what meaningful ways does Erlang prevent race conditions in concurrent programming?

Reading about concurrency in Erlang, reminds me of the Akka concurrency toolkit. Both give you tools to prevent or limit race conditions. But you can send links to mutable data to other processes using the Akka toolkit, which is still unsafe. I…
GlenPeterson
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What makes Erlang suitable for cloud applications?

We are starting a new project and implementing on our corporations's instantiation of an openstack cloud (see http://www.openstack.org/). The project is security tooling for our corporation. We currently run many hundreds of dedicated servers for…
Duncan
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Where is it appropriate to do input validation in Erlang?

I'm writing a module that runs a finite state machine* based on the contents of an array of records passed in at initialization. Each record describes a state and includes instructions on how to act on inputs (i.e., when in state S1, input I…
Blrfl
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Should Erlang systems be monolithic?

Should Erlang systems (or anything running on the BEAM VM) be monolithic, i.e. everything running in the same distributed application, or should they be split into multiple microservices like any python/go/c++ shop would do? Since each process in…
Filip Haglund
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