Hacker News Reader

Comment by dbcurtis | Hacker News Reader

Thanks! I came here to ask the "How do I Erlang?" question. Erlang has been on my radar for a long time but I've never taken the time to dig in. 85% of my code output is obscure protocol stacks in Python+Twisted, the other 15% is real-time embedded C over an RTOS. Even if I can't use Erlang in production, I'm sure I'd find food for thought in the concepts.

View on HN

http://learnyousomeerlang.com/

That book is a good place to start.

> Even if I can't use Erlang in production, I'm sure I'd find food for thought in the concepts.

Oh boy are you going to be in for a treat. The concept for no loop construct other than recursion and recursive thinking was worth it for the little time I dabble in Erlang.

As an erlang newcomer, the non-loop seems to be one of the most intriguing concepts, IMO.

You still have list comprehensions, map, filter, fold and foreach using higher order functions

Sounds excellent. Procedural imperative programming is the curse of computer science. Program counters be damned! Data-flow FTW.

I'm sure there's some tee-shirt art in that rant somewhere.....

You run close to the metal, eh? Then you might find this project interesting to hack on:

http://nerves-project.org/

FWIW, the class for it was the first class to sell out for the upcoming https://elixirconf.com/.

Here's a great presentation by Garth Hitchens on Nerves https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O39ipRsXv3Y (he uses it in production at his company, http://www.rosepoint.com/, which builds sort of vertical-market marine navigation hardware). He mentions some performance stats as well.

Yes, thanks. Good link. I do live on the hardware/software frontier and always have.

I'm a big fan of Micropython, Python on bare metal. Noob question: What is the chance of an Erlang VM on bare metal?

Pretty decent chance: https://www.grisp.org/

wow, first I've heard about this. How does this differ from the Nerves project, which also boots directly into the Erlang VM?

Nerves boots into the ErlangVM, but runs on a buildroot Linux. This makes it possible to run on a wide variety of hardware, but with the associated baggage.

GRiSP uses RTEMS[0] as its base which should make its performance more predictable.

[0] https://www.rtems.org/

The tutorials and core library documentation are really very clean.. You should be able to go pretty far just by installing a package and starting through the tutorials, although OP also has some links to more docs too

Reply on news.ycombinator.com