File sharing software

[Yariv Sadan]

Jay,

It's funny you bring up this article, because I developed Pando's P2P  
core in C, and actually looked at Erlang as a potential language for  
some backend components. I'm not an Erlang expert, but I did quite a  
lot of research into it and found its unique clustering features and  
high level semantics quite appealing. Some issues that I didn't find  
very reassuring, however, were mnesia's rather limited table size (2  
GB according to http://www.erlang.org/doc/doc-5.4.13/lib/ 
stdlib-1.13.12/doc/html/index.html) and unsuitability for handling  
large blobs (noted at http://www.erlang.org/ml-archive/erlang- 
questions/199910/msg00059.html). (By the way, if anybody knows of  
solutions to these issues, please let me know.)

Clearly, the size of the Erlang runtime made Erlang too heavy for the  
client, which needed to be as light as possible. I would have only  
considered Erlang if the runtime were no more than a few hundred KB.  
But then again, my personal philosophy is that when you're developing  
client software, stick to C/C++, which may be harder to write  
bulletproof code in but in the long run pay dividends in user  
satisfaction (a good example is how uTorrent has eclipsed Azureus as  
the most popular BitTorrent client primarily due to its small  
footprint). Having said that, maybe "Erlang lite" is a perfect fit  
for the app you have in mind, which I can't claim to know fully :)

Yariv

On May 1, 2006, at 10:07 PM, Jay Nelson wrote:

Everyone seems to be using digital cameras and video cameras.  They  
are emailing the results among family and friends.  A new group of  
companies is providing a file sharing alternative instead of email,  
that is built on peer-to-peer or even bit torrent:

http://money.cnn.com/2006/05/01/technology/business2_launchpad0501/ 
index.htm

This should be a no brainer type application for erlang, except for  
the big install.  I know Joe has talked about setting up a public  
peer-to-peer network for erlang apps.

This brings up the perennial question of the stripped version of  
erlang.  If there was a 1MB install that was a single file or single  
click, it would be an ideal way to set up this sort of distribution  
network.

Anyone pursuing anything along these lines?

jay