Making reliable distributed systems in the presence of software errors (2003) [pdf]

http://erlang.org/download/armstrong_thesis_2003.pdf

by vismit2000 • 12 months ago

98 21 12 months ago

Erlang (and quite frankly Elixir) really has always seemed like it was, in some form, ahead of its time. I really hope it spikes in popularity.

Any day now...

fzeindl3• 11 months ago

It won‘t but I don‘t get why. The thesis is genius, it even starts with an philosophy and an attempt to formalize software architecture.

Erlang was invented at Ericsson, used for certain phone switches, it was tremendously successful at what it was built to do, and still it‘s not used anymore in their newer switches.

Why?

djtango• 11 months ago

Whatsapp (and IIRC Wechat) were built in Erlang. I think Discord is also Elixir/Rust

My take is that when the advantage to be gained is a superior architecture or set of abstractions that can be built by a small core of engineers then language choice can be an advantage. When the business needs to scale into the real world long tail of integrations, infrastructure, clients etc then throwing bodies at the problem can be an advantage and then ecosystem and talent pool outweigh original language gains.

Sharp tools are at their best in a smaller more focused team... But in software, building the right architecture can in some cases be all the difference

sudohalt• 11 months ago

because the benefits aren't that much greater, and great features in languages like erlang and haskell end up (to some extent) in popular languages (which further reduces the need to adopt such languages)

AceJohnny2• 11 months ago

It won‘t but I don‘t get why.

Remember that Erlang was open-sourced as a last-ditch effort to save it, in 1998, after Ericsson internally switched to C++ and banned using Erlang on new products.

The sad fact is that the software industry as a whole relies heavily on mainstream languages, and not on educating your engineers to leverage the strengths of your specialty language. There's rationale to that, in that it costs a ton to maintain your own platform when you can just leverage a more public one. As a random example, why spend a ton to try and optimize your compiled language when you can... just use GCC (or clang nowadays). See: ongoing complaints about the performance of Go.

Erlang's silver lining is it found some measure of success outside of Ericsson, which led it to being unbanned there (and the banner to being "promoted sideways")

mikaraento• 11 months ago

IIRC it was never used for any voice/call switching. I think it was used in one (line of) ATM switch(es).

jasonwatkinspdx• 11 months ago

I don‘t get why

My experience is people are reluctant to bring a new vm into the fleet.

The jvm, gdb, linux perf stuff for posix apps, these are known quantities. But Erlang is different and weird. It gets some great features as a result of this, but it means most of the IT and Dev orgs are in very unfamiliar and uncomfortable territory.

As for Ericsson themselves, I don't know for certain, but my suspicion is it was driven by the chip/hardware side. They're buying network processors and other components from Broadcom, Qualcomm, ARM flavor whatever, etc, and with each new edition of these gcc will already be ready to go from the vendor, vs erlang may need to be updated to keep current. It probably got old trying to maintain what was almost a parallel OS.

pjmlp• 11 months ago

I am happy enough to have its ideas infect .NET and Java systems, Akka and Orleans.

As I learned with Lisp, ML, Prolog, Smalltalk since the mid-80's, and safer systems languages as well, it is easier to eventually get some of the goodies, than trying to push for the whole thing.

Unfortunely that is how our industry works, until liabily becomes common, the lesser options will always win the market.

7kmph• 11 months ago

It probably won’t, would kill too many businesses and jobs. And frankly many people don’t see its value

macintux2• 11 months ago

Link to the excellent Jim Gray paper that Joe repeatedly cites:

https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Classes/739/Fall2018/Papers...

I gave an Erlang talk many years ago where I used the Tandem architecture as a comparison point, and one of the attendees happened to have worked on them.

I really should chase down the other references for further reading.

RIP, Joe. You were one of a kind.

Making reliable distributed systems in the presence of software errors (2003) [pdf]

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