[dmix]

Having spent quite a bit of time searching for Erlang packages on Github recently, I've found quite a few Erlang packages haven't had commits since around 2013. I believe there was a spike in adoption around 2012-2013 which resulted in a bunch of activity on Github. Which seemed to have tapered off recently. But you still find many core packages that are active - things like JSON parsers, templating libraries, and web frameworks are all lively. And OTP and Erlang itself are always being improved.

Plus there is an up-to-date package manager/global repo (https://hex.pm/) which is used by both Erlang and Elixir. Plus Rebar3, the primary build tool for Erlang projects, is actively developed.

But Elixir packages are very active in general since it's relatively new and these packages can be used within Erlang apps relatively easily as well. Plus the Erlang packages from 2013 that I've used have all been pretty stable. The quality of libraries available on Github have all been very high from my experience. I believe Erlang attracts experienced developers, which is reflected in the typical code quality and documentation.

My only wish is for the Erlang website (http://www.erlang.org/) to get a redesign. It gives the language an esoteric apperance to newbies. Which is a shame because I absolutely love the language and think it's far superior for many of the types of projects for which people have been using Node.

[rdtsc]

I am excited for a continued improvement and enhancement to the language.

Erlang 18 brought maps, people complained about that for years. Erlang 18 also brought (via a feature flag) dirty schedulers so can have long running C function embedded in without messing up process scheduling also an often requested features. Probably the best thought-out handling of time in any language I've seen so far ( synchronization, warping, moving backwards: http://erlang.org/doc/apps/erts/time_correction.html )

Erlang 19 is exciting as well -- 10x faster tracing, dirty schedulers turned on by default, a new state machine OTP module, an external plugin (with LevelDB as one example) for Mnesia storage also something people complained, 2x-3x faster spawning external processes + many others.

The impressive part is that these changes are done to a 30 year old language.

[simoncion]

mnesia_leveldb is scheduled for OTP 19? That's great news!

I can't tell you how many times I've cursed at the overfilled-hours-ago-but-mnesia-didnt-care DETS table shard. Getting a on-disk backend that can store more than 2GB at a time will be great!

It'll be even better if the writer code actually notices failures to write to the backing store and aborts transactions when they happen! [0] :)

[0] Seriously, who thought it was a good idea to ignore the return value from dets:insert/2? :(

[rdtsc]

I think this is the PR so far:

https://github.com/erlang/otp/pull/858

[simoncion]

Man, whoever redesigns erlang.org needs to think really hard about how they're going to re-work the documentation section. It's really good as is:

* Color scheme and fonts are easy to read.

* One can switch between API reference for the current module and Users Guide for its containing application with one click.

* On the left-hand-side one has a scrollable tree of modules in the current application, each of which is expandable to reveal the API calls within any given module.

* Sensible URL scheme: doc/man/$MODULE.html for a module's API docs and doc/apps/$APP/users_guide.html for an application's Users Guide.

[RobertKerans]

It doesn't need much, just very slight tweaks to the typography so it's a bit cleaner + a bit more visual separation between function descriptions + slightly better handling of the navigation. It's just all a little bit jammed together atm, IMO. As I say, wouldn't take much.

One thing I've found I love are the PDF documentation downloads; I wasn't expecting much, but (for example, the xmerl one) they're great, step by step useful examples that I can shove on an ereader to go through. Really solid.