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Comment by rdtsc | Hacker News Reader

I got to about 500K processes on Erlang's VM on an i7 with lots of memory.

These people people got up to 2M concurrent TCP connections

http://blog.whatsapp.com/index.php/2012/01/1-million-is-so-2...

And on top of it, it is using isolated heaps. That is beautiful I think. Completely concurrent GC is beautiful.

I know Erlang syntax is not to for everyone's taste (I do like it though). There is also Elixir (http://elixir-lang.org/). But the underlying BEAM VM is an awesome piece of technology.

> The thought was to have a billion threads on a SPARCStation 10

There are some green-thread C libraries I've been playing with, like Protothreads ( http://dunkels.com/adam/pt/index.html ) and libconcurrency ( https://code.google.com/p/libconcurrency/ ) I think they use setjump/longjump trick. Some use setcontext()/getcontext() POSIX call.

I still like Erlang VM best.

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> There are some green-thread C libraries

Shameless plug for CPC, a compiler translating green-threads to event-driven code: http://gabriel.kerneis.info/software/cpc/

Used to compile coroutines in QEMU during the latest GSoC: http://gabriel.kerneis.info/research/files/qemu-cpc.pdf

Curse you; you added five papers to my already-full reading list :)

After you've been writing a bit of Erlang, you find yourself always putting a "." at the end of lines in other language's interpreters.

I actually really like Erlang and would love to get more familiar with it, but there are very few small projects that are suited to Erlang's domain.

One option is to port your personal site/blog to Zotonic CMS and play around with that.

Or your favourite library from another language, Erlang is quite lacking in that regard. I had a go at porting RSpec:

https://github.com/lucaspiller/espec

ChicagoBoss offers a pretty low barrier for entry as well.

I love Erlang. I've been learning elixir and am recording screen casts at http://elixirsips.com. it's so good for concurrency.

BTW, the only reason the demo runs 10K or a few 10Ks of actors is because this simulation is very much CPU-bound, and no matter how you schedule tasks – you can't create more CPU power in software. In less computation intensive scenarios, Quasar supports millions of actors.

Erlang is really good, especially for engineers with hardware background, who may find FP & Message Passing are more intuitive than OOP & Context Switching.

But it's quite difficult to hire.

Difficult as in you are looking for Erlangers but cannot find them? I haven't seen many postings looking for Erlang programmers.

Seems to be the same thing with Haskell and other languages, including Golang, that many groups on HN are passionate about. There aren't many people hiring for skills in these languages. Some start-up founders I know who have built their company on Python and Javascript, when I ask them if they have looked at Golang, they reply 'What's that?'.

I'd be happy if someone would hire Python. Most of it is Java, PHP and C# around here. So sad.

Where's "here"? I constantly get emails from recruiters looking for Python devs.

(I'm in the SF area, but a lot of the ads I see are for New York and parts of the Midwest.)

Quite frankly, "here" could be anywhere that's not near the Bay Area.

I think so too. I'm located in Germany, but I think this situation applies to most all of the word except the west coast of the U.S.

Python is 22 years old, Golang is 4 years old. Give it time.

Haskell is even older, but you don't see many job ads for it. I don't think it has much to do with the age of the language. Node.js is an example of a very young platform that many, many startups are using. (Although, to be fair, JavaScript has been around for quite some time now.)

In order for a programming language to get used:

* it has to fill a need people have.

* people have to know about it.

* it has to have a mature implementation.

Age helps with point #2 and #3.

With regard to JavaScript, the web browser pretty much forces you to use it. So it doesn't really matter how good or bad it is, it will have adoption.

Yeah I don't see many positions for Haskell, either (and I'd like to). OOP class systems are so irritating when you could get more powerful type-checking from less boilerplate. Maybe I should look into F#? AFAICT it seems to be Haskell's sister, who left academia to do finance and is pulling seven figures in her early twenties.

My group in Azure is hiring. I don't think we have any Haskell in production, but I sure bet we could get away with using F# and the new immutable collections for a lot of new stuff. zip [marshray@; maray] [live.com; @microsoft.com] Email me, I'd love some coworkers who were really into FP.

This sounds interesting. If you don't mind I'd like to get in touch also.

Yes that'd be awesome!

"FP & Message Passing are more intuitive than OOP & Context Switching."

Huh? OOP & Message Passing!

http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/1998-...

Space pilots and nuclear plant engineers are hard to hire because you need hardware to train. Hiring software developers just requires willingness to pay more money than market.

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