Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Despite having invested a bit of time and brainpower in Erlang, I have a suspicion that Scala is more likely to be a better bet over the long haul. It's fast, piggybacks on all the software out there for Java, and seems to be reasonable to use.

I do have some questions about its concurrency abilities though (not rhetorical ones, real ones): I know that Erlang deals really well with concurrency, because of its internal scheduler. It's fairly difficult to completely wedge Erlang, in other words. How does Scala work out from that point of view?



Take a look at what Jonas Boner is doing with Scala OTP: http://jonasboner.com/2008/12/11/real-world-scala-fault-tole... and http://github.com/jboner/scala-otp/tree/master

Stealing some of the great ideas of Erlang and re-implementing them in Scala.


There are a couple of nice articles about Scala vs. Erlang, although they take a more nults-and-bolts view:

http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/06/scala-vs-erlang http://yarivsblog.com/articles/2008/05/18/erlang-vs-scala/

-m


Yeah, Yariv points at what I suspected, that the Erlang model is a bit more robust. However, I wonder if Scala is, in practice, 'good enough'.


Twitter backend processing was rewritten in Scala.. Though I dont have specific opinion yet about Scala, that is a point to be noted.


While we're at it: the backend of the Facebook chat is coded in Erlang. 1-1.

No peculiar opinion about any of them either, btw.


Either one obviously can be used for a great deal of things, that's not what I'm questioning. Mine is more a question of how the theoretical limits of Scala actually impact its real world usage and in what situations.

BTW, in terms of noting points, high end phone systems having N nines uptime is definitely a point for Erlang:-)




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: