Building Polyglot (Scala/Erlang) Systems With Scalang

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36 points·nwjsmith··4 comments

Their claim is: Erlang is good for building scalable distributed systems. Scala has actors too, but Erlang is more than actors (a lot more!). It's a language created to build distributed systems and highly scalable servers.

On the other hand, Scala is good for data crunching and mutable/immutable data processing. And you'd have a hard time dealing with mutable data on Erlang. As they are building a highly scalable data analytics system, it makes a lot of sense to couple the two languages. But I guess Akka is good enough to the other 98% of the use cases you may ever find. ;)

update: An older Cliff Moon's talk about polyglot systems (Erlang and Scala) is available at http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Building-Polyglot-Systems...

Disclaimer: in spite of thinking that Akka is a very cool framework, I think it can quickly become something like Spring, that is, a humongous framework that tries to solve everybody's problems.

Compatible type systems: lol :)

Can anyone expand on the "complementary set of features"? One of the biggest selling points for Scala is Akka, which is basically trying to implement Erlang (as I see it). I'm not very experienced with Erlang, so what's missing from Akka?

Perhaps by complementary he means: - Scala allows you to break away from the share-nothing, strictly immutable constraints of Erlang when you really need to do that for performance. - Erlang has OTP, Scala has access to the full ecosystem of Java libraries.

Not sure what else is complementary.

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