[erlang-questions] The future of Erlang and BEAM

[Radek]

Hello Group,

it's my first post here, although I've been reading many interesting 
posts here for quite a long time.
Anyway, I posted a question on StackOverflow today with the same title 
(here 
<http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9239313/the-future-of-erlang-and-beam>). 
As I've written there, I don't want to start any flame-war, particularly 
because I'm actually an Erlang fan-boy :) but I'd like to know your 
opinion on the subject. Here's the original question:

-------
Some time ago I got seriously interested in Erlang (coming from 
C++/PHP/Java world) - and I've seen it has been successfuly used in the 
industry, by Ericsson, Facebook, Goldman Sachs, etc. So, I thought it 
would be a great platform to build high demanding apps, with low-latency 
profile, with a lot cleaner and nicer language than, for example, Java 
(for me).

But after "wow effect" has gone, I discovered that there are many high 
performance Java libraries that seem to resolve many problems that 
Erlang is theoretically best suited for (real-time, low-latency 
applications, concurrency, fault-tolerance, etc.). Moreover, it seems 
that there are things that, despite Erlang profile, are just not 
possible to achieve on BEAM (like LMAX Disruptor concurrent framework).

So the question arises: is Erlang still the best platform to build such 
demanding applications ? Wouldn't it be better if we stick to one, very 
mature (J)VM and try to make it even better than trying to achieve 
something similar with less resources available (size of OTP team vs. 
JVM team, supporters, etc) ? And is it possible at all to achieve this 
kind of performance and adoption with BEAM ?

And just to make things clear: I don't want to init a flame war here. I 
am just curious becouse I really like Erlang and I think it's a great 
platform and I'd like to invest time and effort to build real-life 
projects on it. But I'd just like to know what others might say about 
that and - if I'wrong - maybe someone could correct me.
-------

I hope we can discuss it since I think it would be valuable not only for me.

Greetings,
Radek
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