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Re:Erlang's not about lightweight processes and message passing by whalesalad on Friday April 11, 2025 @02:03PM (#43656625)
> Isolated process heaps? - Just use OS processes

OS procs are heavyweight. Erlang procs are ~2KB each. You can spin up millions on one box while traditional OS procs would melt your machine. Not even in the same league.

> Supervision trees? - Use kubernetes.

Comparing Kubernetes to Erlang supervision trees misses the mark. K8s is infrastructure that requires significant configuration and maintenance outside your codebase. Erlang's supervision is just code - it's part of your application logic. And those nested supervision trees? Good luck implementing that cleanly in K8s without a ton of custom work.

> Message passing? - Not a big deal, I can write two threads and a shared queue in Java.

Basic threads and queues don't compare to Erlang's sophisticated message passing. Pattern matching on receive makes for cleaner, more maintainable code, and the transparent distribution across nodes comes standard. Building equivalent functionality from scratch would require significantly more code and infrastructure.

"Any sufficiently complicated concurrent program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Erlang."

> Hot code loading? - Java can do that too

Java can reload classes, but Erlang was designed for seamless evolution of running systems. The gen_server callbacks for upgrading state during hot code loading show how deeply this concept is integrated into Erlang's core.

Re:Erlang's not about lightweight processes and message passing by hackernudes on Friday April 11, 2025 @02:18PM (#43656749)
It's funny reading your response because I think you skipped the second half of the comment! Your rebuttals to the rebuttals are pretty similar.
Re:Erlang's not about lightweight processes and message passing by whalesalad on Friday April 11, 2025 @02:26PM (#43656842)
its friday my brain is cooked - you're right.
Re:Erlang's not about lightweight processes and message passing by rdtsc on Friday April 11, 2025 @05:05PM (#43658565)
No worries, at all I had figured you'd notice eventually. But I essentially agreed with you was just saying that common perceptions and how Erlang managed to do well there.