[erlang-questions] QUestions about erlang

[Christian S]

I can hear how other subscribers are tapping away their mail response
to you, so prepare your mailbox to be erlang-questions-dotted

> - Is erlang fast?

It is not good as good at number crunching as ocaml or low level
imperative languages. It does however build fast systems, see this
slide:

http://www.slideshare.net/Arbow/comparing-cpp-and-erlang-for-motorola-telecoms-software/

Also, erlang is very succinct and quick coded. That's an important way
to be fast.

> - How is the persistence/database connection?

My opinion: They work, but they're not to impress with.
Erlang has a database called mnesia that provide much higher
transaction rates than links to external dbs, mnesia also support
distribution over several nodes.

> - Is fully object oriented?

It is fully concurrency oriented.  Erlang is religiously against
hiding mutable state inside objects.

> - What about graphical interface for the apps? and web frontend?

You can create desktop guis using the 'gs' application which is back
ended in Tcl/Tk. This will not impress anyone. There is 'gtknode', a
c-node, a way for erlang to communicate with a c program running GTK+
to exchange events. I dont have experience with it, but it seems great
and you can build the GUI part in Glade.

There is soon a number of web server alternatives popping up. Yaws is
the popular one so far, but I think that might change now that other
commercially used and tested web servers are going open source.

> - PocketPC, Palm support?

There is an ARM port of erlang, might require some assembly.

> - What about the community for support?

Ridiculously good. If I dont get an answer in freenode #erlang within
minutes I get a very good answer from this list in an hour. If it is
during swedish office hours you often get support from the author
directly. It's good to be small.

> - Spanish erlang-developers?

I can't say I have noticed any larger group of spanish erlang developers.