threads - use them as much as you can

[Sean Hinde]

> What is "the industry" using for developing concurrent, 
> (soft) realtime software
> applications (like tele/datacom control systems) these days 
> anyway? (The small
> part of it not using Erlang, that is ;-). I guess it's C and 
> C++ on top of a
> multitasking OS or on top of some threaded SW platform that 
> is the most common.
> What other concurrent high-level languages than Erlang are 
> being used in
> commercial projects, if any?

It is interesting that Java is being pushed very hard into the internet
server application market. This is exactly where concurrency is nice if you
want to have systems which are responsive and resilient to some back end
systems slowing down.

My experience of this type of thing is that even getting the concept or
value of a multithreaded application server over to Java app guys is hard
(denial followed by intransigence and claims of impossibility). The view
seems to be that if it blocks you just get a faster machine - which
demonstrates no real understanding of the timeline aspects of the overall
application.

Then you need lots of load balancing switches :) to force multithreading
into a pool of application instances listening on different ports to get any
throughput!

EJB seems to be the big buzzword and that isn't natively multithreaded at
all.

The strength of this stuff though is the ever growing libraries of APIs to
almost every protocol under the sun, which Erlang can't compete with off the
shelf.

Sigh..

- Sean



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