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Comment by ElemenoPicuares | Hacker News Reader

Seems like Beam is a more specialized tool than JVM but if you need that sort of functionality it's phenomenal. With things like built-in performant persistent key value stores and cluster management I'm kind of surprised more people haven't pushed through the "this is useful but lacks broad adoption" barrier.

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Well… yes and no. A lot of things built in are pretty spartan and not always appropriate (Mnesia …cough…).

This said it’s the only environment I’m aware of that is built around the idea of cluster, not just a local process that may do some rpc to other processes.

You can find libraries for many things but they are not the same quality and breadth as the big Java ones.

I've heard this, but honestly to me it just seems "specialized for writing and running reliable software".

Seemingly reliable for a specific type of problem, though. Most reliable software doesn't require a distributed network to be reliable, and I don't think binary execution on BEAM is any more inherently reliable than the JVM, right?

The BEAM is designed for a software architecture approach called OTP in the Erlang community -- it is designed around trees of process supervision. So there is an entire robust framework for reliability really built in as a primary concern for the BEAM.

https://www.erlang.org/doc/design_principles/des_princ.html

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