Erlang for desktop applications?

[Thomas Lindgren]

--- "Jacobo G. Polavieja" <jacobopolavieja@REDACTED>
wrote:

> 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 

You will definitely be an early adopter if you develop
desktop apps in Erlang; as usual, early adoption means
things haven't been smoothed by a thousand people
before you. Also, being an early adopter, most of the
existing desktop developers will be elsewhere. Being a
trailblazer is more work.

That said, I think general desktop apps still have
some way to go. They often irritatingly freeze up when
blocking for some resource, and they are often
unsophisticated about accessing network resources, for
example. Erlang could help.

> (I don't know if any of those apps need a lot of 
> concurrency where Erlang could be superior
> to C/C++/C#).

Wasn't your initial point that you wanted to exploit
multicore systems? When the clock rate is constant,
your future speedup is determined by available
parallelism, which means you may have to design your
system and algorithms for parallel execution. 

Low amounts of parallelism (e.g., today's apps) means
your app will hit the roof pretty soon, and
furthermore won't be improved by future processor
generations.

(This assumes that the number of cores will start to
double every N months; I'm not entirely convinced that
that will happen for an extended period of time,
though.)

Best,
Thomas


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