[erlang-questions] What I dislike about Erlang

Max Lapshin max.lapshin@REDACTED
Fri Aug 31 09:57:53 CEST 2012


On Fri, Aug 31, 2012 at 11:36 AM, Francesco Mazzoli <f@REDACTED> wrote:
>
> Did you read his post?  His main point about documentation is that people tend
> to document functions but not data structures, which is something that I fully
> agree with.
>

This post has nothing to do with erlang. It is just an ancient
question: waste your time on documenting inner code or not.
I never document such things, because it is silly: you spend more time
on rewriting documentation.

And I perfectly read ffmpeg sources without any documentation inside them.


So, about erlang.

There are two BIG problems in erlang:  error_logger and lack of frames.

error_logger is a problem, because 99% times, when erlang VM crashes,
it was error_logger, that allocated 40 GB of RAM and died.
If erlang is eating 100% CPU, it is error_logger. Error_logger is the
heel of Achilles of erlang. And it is a pity, because it makes
impossible
to create gen_server with states larger than 100 KBytes.


Lack of frames makes almost impossible hot code upgrades with changing
of data structures. It makes impossible distributing plugins.



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