[ssmoot]

And maybe in a project with truly massive memory requirements that's an issue. I've never encountered it (as an issue that is) But I only got into the JVM on 1.6 with Jruby, made the switch to Scala around 1.7, and have been on 1.8 pretty much since release.

A 3GB heap is pretty typical, but that's mostly just room for cache.

If you're writing web-apps, there's a ridiculous amount of opportunity for using Actors to good effect.

On the other hand I try to keep an eye on resources. I try not to throw millions of messages at an Actor. If I'm batch processing, I'm probably work-pulling, mapping and prefetching my Sources to attempt to minimize latency. Even if I could tune mailbox sizes to avoid all that I prefer not to code in upper bounds on input.

I would be surprised to hear this is a widespread problem in people's work. You don't often hear the same complaints from Rubyists for example and they're much worse off in that regard. So I feel like this case is massively overstated.

But if you have that problem I can certainly see how that might figure into your equation.

[vvanders]

Not everything is web-apps either. If you've got soft realtime requirements(<30ms) GC will hurt you. We spend a lot of time doing twists-and-turns in Java to not allocate anything to avoid that Gen-0 GC.

Erlang's GC model is just incredibly elegant. Almost like pooled allocators that we used to use in GameDev but in a completely transparent and intuitive way.

[ssmoot]

I'll concede that. But you have to admit this is an incredibly niche problem space.

OTOH the JVM will have much higher throughput on the other 99% of apps.

Don't get me wrong. I like Erlang. It's definitely in my top.. Uhm... 3 languages of interest. Being the only other language I know with Pattern Matching is a huge huge part of that.

For most developers I'd just be careful in making that jump. Because most of what this article is about isn't Erlang specific. It's more like a pretty small club of platforms/languages. IMO.

[vvanders]

Yeah, but real-time is about latency not throughput :).

FWIW a lot of game engines use message passing between components/actors due to the low coupling and architectural benefits so it's not quite as small of a domain as you think.