Erlang meets Lisp (again)

Also see http://marijn.haverbeke.nl/pcall/background.html . (Tooting my own horn, of course.)

And again... I'm putting a few finishing touches on a port of Distel to PLT Scheme that I plan to release this week. I mention it now only because I would hate to see this article inspire anyone to go off and invest in too much duplication of effort. Lisp and Erlang do go together very nicely.

But to answer the question posed by the article, FFI binding to the C erl_interface quickly gets very nasty, with lots of manual memory management. (It was the first thing I tried, since PLT has such great FFI support.) It's actually much easier to just speak the wire protocol, esp. with the Distel source to build on.

Clojure is a different philosophy than Erlang but still relevant since it is LISP + concurrency + it runs on the JVM so you get access to all those nice JAVA libraries.