[erlang-questions] Erlang is the best choice for building commercial application servers

[Jesper Louis Andersen]

On 3/15/12 12:55 AM, Jan Burse wrote:
>
> But the Java performance also surprised me. Especially since
> the code contains many new expressions. But rumors have
> it that new is just a pointer decrement in Java.
>
It may be more than a rumor. Most GC'ed languages turn out to do 
something like that, and the allocation only costs for deallocation if 
you keep a reference to the allocated object.

Java can routinely outperform Erlang if the problem at hand is CPU 
bound. It is exactly the kind of jobs that Erlang does not excel at, one 
way or the other. But take a larger system, and the performance of the 
language matter less and less, the larger the system. Then all hinges on 
the programmers and how quickly they can express their ideas. And in the 
game of expressing problems quickly and succinctly, you definitely need 
languages far from Java. Erlang, Ocaml and Haskell are my typical tools 
for quickly expressing problems.

Real world problems are constrained by programmer time. So if you spend 
all your time debugging pesky null problems, state errors and writing 
boilerplate, then you are not going to get far.

-- 
Jesper Louis Andersen
   Erlang Solutions Ltd., Copenhagen, DK