www.youtube.com
Erlang, a functional, fault-tolerant programming language, was designed at Ericsson in 1986 for large-scale concurrent systems. Its development was propelled by the need to enhance telecommunications infrastructure, leading to the creation of the BEAM virtual machine. Erlang’s unique programming model enables efficient handling of millions of concurrent processes with minimal overhead, ensuring system resilience through process isolation and hot code swapping. Today, Erlang continues to underpin modern languages and systems, demonstrating significant influence in the programming community.
Main Points
Fault Tolerance
Erlang is known for its fault tolerance, facilitated through process isolation and a philosophy of allowing individual processes to fail without impacting the whole.
BEAM Virtual Machine Importance
Erlang’s BEAM virtual machine allows for millions of concurrent processes with low overhead, and is still in use by modern languages like Elixir.
Message Passing Model
Erlang’s programming model, which emphasizes message passing, is critical for its ability to handle billions of messages daily across various platforms.
Insights
Erlang is a functional, fault-tolerant programming language and runtime, developed in 1986 at Ericsson for massive concurrent systems.
erlang a functional fault tolerant programming language and runtime famous for scaling up the entire telecommunications industry with its bare hands it was developed in 1986 at Swedish company Ericson where massive concurrent systems were needed to handle millions of phone calls in parallel
Erlang's early implementations were written in Prolog, but because it was too slow, BEAM was developed.
early implementations were written in prologue but that was too slow and that led to the development of beam a virtual machine that compiles earling to bite code which is then executed in a threaded environment where millions of processes can run concurrently with very low overhead
Erlang's philosophy includes allowing processes to fail without crashing the entire system, facilitating hot code swapping and process isolation.
but when your code breaks a process, the earling philosophy is to let it fail so the entire system doesn’t come crashing down that process isolation is what makes it fall tolerant
Erlang's concurrency model is based on message passing, similar to mailbox operation, which is key to its fault tolerance and scalability.
and that’s all thanks to a programming model based on message passing that works just like your mailbox