Joe Armstrong: Solving the wrong problem

Re:Joe Armstrong: Solving the wrong problem by PixelPusher on Wednesday March 27, 2013 @04:01PM (#5451637)

Well, zlib is fairly trivial and probably not a good example due to overheads. However, an example such as a torrent server this would make much more sense. That being said, Erlang is basically a scripting language for building fault-tolerant and parallel applications.

Using C, you might be able to get parallel, but it'll be a lot of work to make it distributed and fault tolerant.

The underlying data structures have little to nothing to do with what's being said in the article.

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Re:Joe Armstrong: Solving the wrong problem by eridius on Wednesday March 27, 2013 @04:07PM (#5451683)

I've looked at Erlang before, and I would certainly agree that it's far simpler to write a concurrent application in Erlang than it would be in C.

I'm just taking issue with the bit at the end, where they're bragging about removing a serial bottleneck by rewriting zlib in Erlang in order to remove a lock. Rewriting it in Erlang really doesn't have anything at all to do with switching to a lock-free data structure.

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Re:Joe Armstrong: Solving the wrong problem by PixelPusher on Wednesday March 27, 2013 @04:30PM (#5451829)

Ah yeah, I had to read it a second time to realize what you meant. That's true, that it's a bad example and doesn't make much sense.

I think what they meant to say was that they parallelized the image processing mechanism of the application as a whole.

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