Electronic Arts is using Erlang | Hacker News Reader

Electronic Arts is using Erlang

github.com

62 pointsold_sound20 comments

Inspires confidence in a language when drivers for a major database are side projects released on github?

This is one of the main reasons I just walked away from erlang, the ratio of buzz vs its supportive environment for the real world is very high.

I remember the last time I had to connect to mysql from erlang I had to download a few library files from some company nice enough to release them and dump them into my projects directory.

> I remember the last time I had to connect to mysql from erlang I had to download a few library files from some company nice enough to release them and dump them into my projects directory

Forgive my ignorance in all things erlang but how is this different to connecting to MySQL from Java?

MySQL Connector/J[1] (the JDBC driver) is actually produced by the same company that makes the database?

[1]: http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/j/

This is a very real problem with many "hyped" languages. Sure, they might seem more powerful and elegant, but if you got to spend tons of time re-implementing basic networking/web libraries, then what's the point in using them for web development.

I am a coauthor of the original emysql. I wouldn't recommend using Erlang for your average web application. I would recommend it when the problem you're solving thrives on an idiomatically distributed and fault tolerant platform.

Enter something like Clojure whose "host" platform is not just an implementation detail, but a feature.

Nowadays you add things like this as a dep to rebar.conf (the most popular build system):

    {deps, [ {epgsql, "0.2", {git, "https://github.com/Eonblast/Emysql.git", "master"}} ]}.

It seems unlikely that the Erlang standard library (OTP) is going to include database drivers. However, having to specify such things is a small price to pay considering all the amazing stuff you get for free with Erlang.

Agner is your solution!

http://erlagner.org/

EA is no longer using Erlang, at least none of the code related to this project. I was engineering manager for the rupture team at the tail end of our time at EA. Our entire backend was built using Erlang, and ufortunately the existing MySQL drivers were less than stable, forcing us to build our own.

EA bought Shawn Fanning's company Rupture a few years ago and they used Erlang.

Exactly. And there has also been a position open at EA for Erlang to deal with the inherited tech:

http://erlang.2086793.n4.nabble.com/Open-Erlang-developer-po...

That link is not working anymore, but that Erlang position was still open when I left EA in December. So it was unfilled for a month shy of 2 years.

There are a number of Erlang devs out there looking for projects - I know because I run erlanginside.com and they often send me their CVs - so not filling a position like that is for some other reason than that there are no talented devs w/experience.

I was a hiring manager at Electronic Arts for a team that exclusively used Erlang. It's very hard to find Erlang talent.

Many candidates have used Erlang in an exploratory capacity and have no real experience supporting a production Erlang application under load or troubleshooting concurrency problems in a distributed system.

That said, it was great to see a lot of passion for Erlang. I enjoy writing it, and hope the language and community continue to evolve.

Wow, a couple of years ago it would have seemed unthinkable that a company like EA would release some of their code as open source. Only very few major game companies released code back then (I can think of only id and Insomniac).

Some of us our trying to turn that around. My studio, EA2D, has a lot of people from the startup space, so sharing is only natural. We have a small but quickly growing list of open source projects (many more in the pipeline):

https://github.com/EA2D

We also have an engineering blog:

http://eng.ea2d.com/

And we're hiring (drop me a line, mikeb@ea2d.com):

http://ea2d.com/jobs/

It took ages for us to get the approvals for it, but the Star Wars: The Old Republic web team can now push our patches and custom modules for Drupal back to that community, too.

They opened up EASTL a while back too.

http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2007/n227...

https://github.com/paulhodge/EASTL

That's not all of EASTL, unfortunately. Much of it is still behind closed doors.

Jacob Vorreuter has several projects open sourced at github that we used at Rupture (Electronic Arts.)

https://github.com/jacobvorreuter (emongo, erlmc, dynamic_compile, etc.)

Jake was a long time member of the Erlang team, and a lot of side projects were influenced by pain points from our day to day work.

Open source at EA: http://gpl.ea.com/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com