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by vvanders 3726 days ago
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.
1 comments
ssmoot 3726 days ago
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.

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vvanders 3726 days ago
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.

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