Erlang for desktop applications?

[Christian S]

> Think that when I say desktop apps I refer to a whole bunch of typical
> apps you can see in a desktop, not just one app I could have in mind
> right now. Think of filemanagers, games, media players and that sort of
> apps... And as I've just said to Richard A. O'Keefe, I don't know if
> Erlang is also strong in those kind of developments (I don't know if any
> of those apps need a lot of concurrency where Erlang could be superior
> to C/C++/C#).

Don't make the mistake to think that concurrency in Erlang is just
good for increasing computational throughput. Processes are also
useful in a purely software engineering way: they provide isolation
between independant tasks.

A modern GUI is typically very concurrent, the user expect to be able
to jump between programs or views within programs (think tabbed
browsing). Imagine if when firefox hit a site that exposed some bug in
the renderer it would not all crash, just that tab, wouldnt it be
nice?  Browsers whose GUI lock up while a domain name is being
resolved feel quite ancient too, dont they?

As for media players, sure, erlang might not be the best choice to
implement a video decoder (though computers are so scarily fast now i
would not be surprised if erlang could achive full framerate).
However, during playing I expect to be able to pick a new file to play
without stopping the current one, and also interrupt myself from file
browsing and adjust the volume then continue browsing for that cool
Erlang video.