Atomic ets

[Matthias Lang]

Robert Raschke writes:

 > If your application uses ets as a communication mechanism between
 > processes, that is surely quite a sore design mistake.

Looking at a freshly started erlang node, I can see a number of ETS
tables:

   1> ets:all().               
   [ac_tab,
    inet_db,
    inet_hosts,
    file_io_servers,
    inet_cache,
    global_names_ext,
    global_locks,
    global_names,
    10,
    9]

In some (many? most?) cases, ETS seems to have been used for no
particularly good reason at all. For example: inet_db is a gen_server
which uses an ets table (inet_db) to store its 20
configuration/environment parameters.

The only explanation I can think of is "it must be historical
junk". Or am I missing something?

Matthias