[erlang-questions] Erlang/OTP R12B-3 has been released

[Benjamin Tolputt]

Please see comments embedded below.

Torbjorn Tornkvist wrote:
> This is an interesting question, i.e how much do you really gain
> from using hipe (native) compiled code?
>   
This is a question I sadly cannot answer for Windows without access to 
HiPE on the platform *laugh* That said, for Linux platforms & the like - 
the performance would depend on the code being executed (as your next 
comment referred to). I would be interested in seeing a benchmark on the 
performance gains over a variety of different tasks.
> I suspect that in (Erlang written) production systems, I/O is where most
> of the time is spent. So using Hipe compiled code will not have any real
> impact. If would love to be proven wrong here, so if someone has got any
> figures to present...
My thoughts on this are "Yes & no". Yes, I believe most production 
systems written in Erlang that are *currently deployed* would be highly 
IO bound. However, this I believe is an artefact of Erlang's origins 
more than a good excuse to not bother with HiPE on other platforms. Take 
for example, Wings 3D, my favourite modelling application. Some 
functions are highly CPU bound (smoothing & rendering for instance). Or 
Vendetta Online's Kourier back-end system controlling & simulating NPC 
agents throughout their virtual space game. Or my AIML interpreter 
prototype (i.e. Alice chatbot for Erlang), which is bound on IO only for 
the initial input & the resulting output. Or my experiments with Erlang 
NEAT (neural network agent evolution). And so on.

My point is, Erlang is not only good for a variety of non-IO bound 
application, it is already being used for such applications and their 
number is growing as the news of Erlang spreads. Erlang is already past 
IO bound applications and as such we should look beyond this performance 
limitation when considering Erlang features.

--Ben