alt Hacker NewsEh maybe. I work on a big, mature, production erlang system which has millions of processes per cluster and while the author is right in theory, these are quite extreme edge cases and i’ve never tripped over them.
Sure, if you design a shit system that depends on ETS for shares state there are dangers, so maybe don’t do that?
I’d still rather be writing this system in erlang than in another language, where the footguns are bigger.
Replies
dnautics • today at 3:18 PM
in ten years of BEAM ive written a deadlock once. and zero times in prod.
id say its better to default to call instead of pushing people to use cast because it won't lock.
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myrak • today at 2:02 PM
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Treating ETS as the only footgun misses a few ugly ones, because a bad mailbox backlog or a gen_server chain can turn local slowness into cluster-wide pain before anything actually crashes.
Erlang does make some failure modes less nasty. It also hides latency debt well enough that people thinks the model saved them right up until one overloaded process turns the whole system into a distributed whodunit.