[erlang-questions] What are the "Most valuable libraries?"...and a few other questions

[Michael Truog]

On 05/19/2011 11:10 PM, Richard O'Keefe wrote:
>> On Tue, May 17, 2011 at 5:25 PM, Todd <t.greenwoodgeer@REDACTED> wrote:
>> 4b. Side note: is anyone concerned about Akka/Typesafe stealing mindshare?
> Having read Williamson's "Legion of Space" series, I would feel rather
> unhappy using AKKA (:-).

Not sure if you saw it, but there now is pykka (for python, at https://github.com/jodal/pykka ).

Even if these and other libraries (jetlang is the basis for akka, kilim which came before it, in the Java world, etc.) support message passing based scheduling of light-weight processes in a way that facilitates creating Actors, the libraries are unlikely to perform as well as Erlang because:
- The amount of research/development that has gone into Erlang
- The process-based garbage collection which can not be found through a message passing library

Ok, even if the message based scheduling of light-weight processes is as efficient (comparable) to Erlang (ignoring garbage collection problems), a library will not give you code-level fault-tolerance (unless you go through a lot of painful development with custom code that lacks testing and increases the complexity of your codebase).  So, I do not think there will be an Erlang replacement anytime soon.