alt Hacker NewsTreating 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.
Oh, I didn’t mean it’s the only one.
There are a bunch for sure! Turns out writing concurrent reliable distributed systems is really hard. I’ve not found anything else that makes them easier to deal with than BEAM though.
I’d switch if something better came along and happened to also be as battle hardened. I’ll be waiting a while i think.