[erlang-questions] what is the "race condition bug in core Erlang" mentioned by @damienkatz? (was: Re: erlang-questions Digest, Vol 95, Issue 9)

[Raoul Duke]

> I'm also seeing some folks in this thread being unhappy and somewhat angry.
> Apparently they seem to interpret Damien's opinion as bashing of Erlang.
> Which is IMHO not the case. I think his arguments apply for core database
> software.
>
> And In my humble opinion candid expressions like that should be encouraged
> and studied with cold minds.

personally i agree. i'd rather even see some nasty rants that are
wrong (somebody named Z. S. comes to mind :-) than no rants at all. it
is important to look at things from lots of angles. it is no skin off
my back to ignore the utterly wrong rants. or just use them as
entertainment. but if they have a nugget of truth in them anywhere,
that is worth me hearing and learning from.

> As for plans of using Erlang in Couchbase (which is former Membase). We
> indeed plan to incrementally and gradually rewrite performance sensitive
> pieces in C or C++. But there are no concrete plans of getting rid of Erlang
> entirely, yet. It works ok for our cluster management layer.
>
> And IMHO compared to some our competitors which either do all in low-level
> language (mongo, rethinkdb) or high-level (riak) our approach of combining
> low-level language for "moving bits around" and high-level language for
> cluster management and orchestration seems to work best.
>
> So even if we switch off Erlang completely, we'll very likely still use
> something much higher level than C for cluster management and other not
> performance sensitive but sometimes tricky pieces.

in other words, we need another blog posting on the Unreasonable
Effectiveness of Higher Level Languages Than Just Dumb C When I'm
Doing More Than Performance Sensitive but Sometimes Tricky Pieces. :-)

sincerely.