[erlang-questions] What are the "Most valuable libraries?"...and a few other questions

[Andy Kriger]

On Fri, May 20, 2011 at 2:59 AM, Michael Truog <mjtruog@REDACTED> wrote:
> On 05/19/2011 11:10 PM, Richard O'Keefe wrote:
>>> On Tue, May 17, 2011 at 5:25 PM, Todd <t.greenwoodgeer@REDACTED> wrote:
>>> 4b. Side note: is anyone concerned about Akka/Typesafe stealing mindshare?
>> Having read Williamson's "Legion of Space" series, I would feel rather
>> unhappy using AKKA (:-).
>
> Not sure if you saw it, but there now is pykka (for python, at https://github.com/jodal/pykka ).
>
> Even if these and other libraries (jetlang is the basis for akka, kilim which came before it, in the Java world, etc.) support message passing based scheduling of light-weight processes in a way that facilitates creating Actors, the libraries are unlikely to perform as well as Erlang because:
> - The amount of research/development that has gone into Erlang
> - The process-based garbage collection which can not be found through a message passing library
>
> Ok, even if the message based scheduling of light-weight processes is as efficient (comparable) to Erlang (ignoring garbage collection problems), a library will not give you code-level fault-tolerance (unless you go through a lot of painful development with custom code that lacks testing and increases the complexity of your codebase).  So, I do not think there will be an Erlang replacement anytime soon.
> _______________________________________________

If anything Akka will expose more Java folks to Erlang concepts and
potentially draw people looking for a way out of neo-COBOL.