[erlang-questions] Re: Distributions of Erlang-coded SW on Windows (really)

[Michael Turner]

>2009/8/14 Benjamin Tolputt <btolputt@REDACTED>:
>
>> And this is where I start to disagree. Not so much with your desire to
>> get more helpful answer, but with the idea that applications not running
>> on Windows boxes are somehow less important than those running on other
>> platforms (if that was not what you meant by "real users" than I
>> apologise).

"Real users" might not have been the wisest choice of term, but I did
say that *most* of the ones I anticipate would be on Windows, not all. 
And measures of importance depend on where you sit.

>> Erlang/OTP is, by design, a platform best suited to running servers.

I'd say rather that Erlang (the language), by design, is suited to
parallelism of a kind most often seen now on the server side.  OTP
consists significantly of components typical of the server side.  But in
what I'm working on, I want to address mass-market client-side
multicore, which could be big.  And I'm hardly alone in that.

>> Client applications generally don't need to be running thousands of
>> processes (with the possible exception of games - my particular
>> interest), so the primary benefits are lost.

"Are" is a present-tense verb.  And this is the computer industry
we're talking about.

As desktop machines move to 4-core and 8-core, Erlang might start to
become more important there.  On the games side -- well, *theoretically*
I don't see why Erlang optimizing compilers couldn't become more
stream-oriented, and eventually make use of GPUs, for graphics and for
general acceleration, not just more (conventional-architecture) cores. 
But again, if so, the green field there will be Windows desktops and
laptops, and eventually handheld multiprocessor devices with more audio
and video signal processing capability than most of today's desktop PCs.

>> Not that they aren't useful
>> or such like, just that the benefits Erlang can provide give best "bang
>> for your buck" on server architectures :)

On 8/14/2009, "Dave Pawson" <dave.pawson@REDACTED> wrote:

>I think Microsoft also sell servers?
>More assumptions?

At the risk of precipitating ravening hatred: I think portability of open
source to Wintel has probably brought more open source value directly to
more people, and given the concept of open source more general
validation, than any other move to any other sort of platform.

I have no love for Microsoft.  Quite the contrary.  But most people in
the world are on Windows, and many corporate types can be persuaded to
cave in to open source solutions when you tell them that they are
platform-agnostic.  As most are, actually.

I used to hate it when marketing types explained their various
unaesthetic product configurations in terms of "overcoming a sales
objection."  Eventually I saw the wisdom of it.  Free software is not
really free, because nothing is.  You can face a sales objection even at
a sticker price of zero.  The objection won't necessarily be very
rational.  But that doesn't make it any less real.

-michael turner