Hacker News Reader

Comment by im_down_w_otp | Hacker News Reader

Almost all the successful non-Google ad networks and exchanges are written in Erlang, Goldman Sachs HFT platform is written in Erlang, several massive scale game platform backends are written in Erlang, several international "national net" banking switches are written in Erlang, a huge chunk of the global land-line and mobile telco switching infrastructure is written in Erlang, Heroku's control plane is written in Erlang, GitHub's RPC backplane is written in Erlang, Amazon SimpleDB is written in Erlang, Bet365's high-scale betting platform is written in Erlang, Pinterest is migrating services to Elixir (rooted in Erlang).

There's a ton of stuff written in Erlang out there. A lot of really core infrastructure services that have to just run and run and run.

It's not particularly trendy, but it gets shit done, and it does so with a quiet dignity. :-)

View on HN

Do you have references for the claim about telco switching?

http://erlang.se/publications/ericsson_review_axd301_1998012...

erlang was literally developed for telephone switches

That's a product from the late nineties. I have no idea how broadly it's used today.

A talk by Joe Armstrong I watched recently indicated that around 50% of 3G and more than that of 4G infrastructure uses Ericsson technology, specifically with swoftware written in Erlang. He made a joke about 'sweating over every bit' sent over the network and then complaining that all the apps are going crazy with their JSON.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ericsson#Products_and_services

Erlang is mentioned only once in this entire article, and it's in the "See also" section. Nothing in this Wikipedia article supports the claim that Ericsson uses Erlang at all.

Sorry, you're right. I was more indicating at the fact that they power a huge amount of the infrastructure of mobile and telecoms.

Here's some sources that indicate that Erlang is still in daily use at Ericsson:

http://www.ericsson.com/ericsson/corpinfo/publications/revie...

http://www.ericsson.com/news/141204-inside-erlang-creator-jo...

I'm sorry I can't find the exact video I saw from Joe, but he's generally quite proud of the reach of Erlang so you'll find him stating the facts about how much of the mobile and telecoms infrastructure it supports in a few of his videos! I hope that helps.

Watch this video it explains clearly how it is used:

https://youtu.be/rQIE22e0cW8?t=662

And it is also fun!

That was the reason Erlang was created in the first place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erlang_%28programming_language...

I know that. The last I heard was that Erlang decided to stop developing with Erlang, causing Armstrong and others to leave. I see they've reverses that decision and there are mentions of use at various mobile companies, so that's cool.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com