OTP development, was Re: Gaga about bifs

[Niclas Eklund]

Hello!

>  > general improvements, significant and otherwise, seem to have 
>  > ground to a halt, or at least be in a state of confusion.  

I'd like to add that some new features/improvements may not be visible to
all users since they simply don't use "every" application. Still, these
changes can be very important for both licensed & open source users. Some
improvements are a bit harder to discover (e.g. performance boost, less
memory usage etc), unless one read the release notes carefully.

It's easier to notice new applications, but they're probably not equally
important to all users. For example, since R7B we've introduced:

 * et

 * observer

 * megaco

 * webtool

 * CORBA applications (cosEventDomain, cosFileTransfer, cosNotification,
   cosProperty and cosTime).

.. and there are more to come.

/Niclas


> R9B included native compilation. That's significant by any definition.
> 
> It has been more than three years since Erlang went open source and
> the OTP group's efforts are still outclassing everyone else. Quietly.
> 
> It'd really make my day if someone I've never heard of before turned
> up on the mailing list and said "I've implemented an SS7 stack using
> the bit syntax, it's available at ftp.wherever.net". I realise that's
> unlikely, so I'll settle for falling off my chair the day someone
> _starts_ a discussion about altering the language (replacing records,
> adding a type checker, reorganising all the libraries) by providing a
> prototype implementation of their latest and greatest idea*.
> 
> Matthias
> 
>  * This does sometimes happen, e.g. Richard Carlsson's hierarchical modules.