I think a lot of issues BEAM was trying to solve were solved by processors getting bigger and more cores.

BEAM's benefit 10-20 years ago where that inter-node communication was essentially the same as communicating in the same process. Meaning i could talk to an actor on a different machine the same way as if it was in the same process.

These days people just spin up more cores on one machine. Getting good performance out of multi-node erlang is a challenge and only really works if you can host all the servers on one rack to simulate a multi-core machine. The built in distributed part of erlang doesn't work so well in modern VPS / AWS setup, although some try.

“Just spin up more cores on one machine” has a pretty low scale ceiling, don’t you think? What, 96 cores? Maybe a few more on ARM? What do you do when you need thousands or tens of thousands of cores?

Well, what I do is think of functions as services, and there are different ways to get that, but BEAM / OTP are surely among them.

> What do you do when you need thousands or tens of thousands of cores?

I think most software won't need to scale that far. Did you run into any systems like that built on top of BEAM?

I’m just saying, erlang was built for telephony at scale, not for building some REST website. “You probably won’t need more than one big host for any given request” isn’t really a winning argument for scaled systems

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe "scale" in the original context meant developing a system with strong fault tolerance properties, so that if a node went down to ie a hardware failure, the system as a whole would keep working normally.

So, did you run into any systems that needed to scale to tens of thousands of cores for a reason inherent to the problem they were solving, and was built on top of BEAM?

Massive context switching and type checking on Erlang is inferior.

It's a nice point. I am a fan of the beam runtime, and it has been an influence on the design decisions of kameo. However I don't see myself switching to another language from Rust anytime soon, especially with the amazing advancements with wasm and such.

Although Elixir is a nice language, I struggle to enjoy writing code in a language lacking types.

Fair response.