Erlang
Erlang is a general-purpose, concurrent, functional programming language known for its high availability, distribution, fault tolerance and soft real-time capabilities. It was originally developed by Ericsson for telecom applications.
Erlang: General-Purpose Programming Language
A high availability programming language known for its concurrent, functional, and fault-tolerant features, originally developed by Ericsson for telecom applications.
What is Erlang?
Erlang is a general-purpose, concurrent, functional programming language and runtime environment. It was originally designed by Ericsson in 1986 for building distributed, fault-tolerant soft real-time systems with requirements for high availability. Erlang has built-in support for concurrency, distribution and fault tolerance.
Some key features of Erlang include:
- Concurrency - Erlang uses the actor model for concurrency. Processes in Erlang are lightweight and message passing is the main method of communication.
- Distribution - It is easy to distribute Erlang systems over multiple cores and computers. The messaging system transparently sends messages between processes regardless of location.
- Fault Tolerance - Erlang has features for supervision, error detection, error propagation and recovery from errors. This helps build reliable systems.
- Soft Real-Time - Soft real-time support allows responding within a known time span, good for telecom apps.
- Hot Swapping - Code can be updated without stopping the system, essential for systems requiring high uptime.
Due to its strengths in concurrency, distribution and fault tolerance, Erlang is widely used for building telecom systems, banking systems, e-commerce sites, messaging platforms, distributed databases and web servers that require high availability.
Erlang Features
Features
- Concurrency-oriented
- Fault tolerance
- Distributed computing
- Hot swapping
- Soft real-time capabilities
Pricing
- Open Source
Pros
Built-in support for concurrency
Fast and consistent response times
Reliability and fault tolerance
Scalability
Hot code swapping
Cons
Steep learning curve
Limited libraries compared to other languages
Not suitable for computationally intensive tasks
Poor string handling capabilities
Official Links
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