The Next Mainstream Programming Language: A Game Developer's

[Robert Fraser]

But green threads don't take advantage of multi-core processors, neh?

Julio César Carrascal Urquijo Wrote:

> Bruno Medeiros wrote:
> > Hum, again Erlang, interesting. I had heard a bit about it before, on an 
> > article (again don't remember where) about a comparison between Apache 
> > and a web server built in Erlang. On a multicore machine Erlang did much 
> > because of it's massively parallel capabilities, etc..
> 
> Probably this one: http://www.sics.se/~joe/apachevsyaws.html
> 
> 
> > This makes Erlang very interesting, but one must then ask questions 
> > like: What restrictions does Erlang's approach have? Does it have 
> > disadvantages in other areas or aspects of programming? Is it good as a 
> > general purpose programming language, or is it best only when doing 
> > concurrent applications? Can any of it's ideas be applied to imperative 
> > languages like D, Java, C#, etc.?
> 
> My (very limited) experience with Erlang on a (very small) pet project 
> is that you can't just transliterate a Java or C# app to Erlang. The 
> paradigm is too different, you have to redesign the entire app to 
> benefit from Erlang's features; but, once you start to get comfortable 
> with it you get several times more productive with Erlang.
> 
> 
> > I personally am not looking deep into this (never had the use to study 
> > concurrency in-depth so far), I'm just pointing out that a lot of things 
> > have to be considered, and I have a feeling that there must be some 
> > downside to Erlang, or otherwise everyone else would be trying to bring 
> > Erlang aspects into their languages. Or maybe Erlang is just taking 
> > momentum. Time will tell.
> 
> Some of it's concurrency features could be implemented as a library. 
> gen_server and family is a Template Method using callbacks + Green 
> threads + error recovery on steroids.
> 
> What I'd really like to see on D is the bit syntax and pattern matching. 
> It is very useful to implement binary protocols and parsers. But I'm not 
> holding my breath.