I first encountered Erlang in 2017 while working with RabbitMQ, a message broker built on Erlang. Its ability to handle high concurrency, fault tolerance, and real-time execution made it ideal for our ETL process. Erlang was born at Ericsson in 1986 to power telecom systems demanding “nine-nines” availability (99.9999999% uptime). Open-sourced in 1998, it gained traction beyond telecom, influencing modern messaging apps like WhatsApp and Discord. By James Seconde.
Erlang’s “Let It Crash” philosophy contrasts with traditional defensive programming. Instead of preventing failures, it embraces them, recovering swiftly using supervision trees. This resilience is enabled by the BEAM Virtual Machine, which manages lightweight, isolated processes at lightning speed.
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- Designed by Ericsson in 1986 for telecom systems needing “nine-nines” uptime (99.9999999%).
- Open-sourced in 1998, leading to widespread adoption in messaging (WhatsApp, Discord) and other fields.
- “Let It Crash” philosophy—failures are embraced, and processes are automatically recovered.
- Runs on the BEAM VM, enabling lightweight concurrency with rapid process switching.
- Supports hot code swapping, allowing live updates without downtime.
- Ideal for IoT, distributed databases (CouchDB, Riak), and real-time systems.
- Erlang remains a top choice for scalable, fault-tolerant applications.
A standout feature is hot code swapping, allowing updates without downtime—a key reason for its success in IoT, distributed databases (like CouchDB and Riak), and messaging systems. Erlang remains a powerful choice for developers needing scalability and reliability. Good read!
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