Erlang is a general-purpose programming language and runtime environment. Erlang has built-in support for concurrency, distribution and fault tolerance. Erlang is used in several large telecommunication systems from Ericsson. Erlang is available as open source from http://www.erlang.org.
1.2 What is OTP?OTP (Open Telecom Platform) is a large collection of libraries for Erlang to do everything from compiling ASN.1 to providing a WWW server. Most projects using "Erlang" are actually using "Erlang/OTP", i.e. the language and the libraries. OTP is also open source.
1.3 What sort of applications is Erlang particularly suitable for?Distributed, reliable, soft real-time concurrent systems.
Telecommunication systems, e.g. controlling a switch or converting protocols.
Servers for Internet applications, e.g. a mail transfer agent, an IMAP-4 server, an HTTP server or a WAP Stack.
Telecommunication applications, e.g. handling mobility in a mobile network or providing unified messaging.
Database applications which require soft realtime behaviour.
Erlang is good at solving these sorts of problems because this is the problem domain it was originally designed for. Stating the above in terms of features:
Erlang provides a simple and powerful model for error containment and fault tolerance (supervised processes).
Concurrency and message passing are a fundamental to the language. Applications written in Erlang are often composed of hundreds or thousands of lightweight processes. Context switching between Erlang processes is typically one or two orders of magnitude cheaper than switching between threads in a C program.
Writing applications which are made of parts which execute on different machines (i.e. distributed applications) is easy. Erlang's distribution mechanisms are transparent: programs need not be aware that they are distributed.
The OTP libraries provide support for many common problems in networking and telecommunications systems.
The Erlang runtime environment (a virtual machine, much like the Java virtual machine) means that code compiled on one architecture runs anywhere. The runtime system also allows code in a running system to be updated without interrupting the program.
People use Erlang for all sorts of surprising things, for instance to communicate with X11 at the protocol level, but, there are some common situations where Erlang is not likely to be the language of choice.
The most common class of 'less suitable' problems is characterised by performance being a prime requirement and constant-factors having a large effect on performance. Typical examples are image processing, signal processing, sorting large volumes of data and low-level protocol termination.
Another class of problem is characterised by a wide interface to existing C code. A typical example is implementing operating system device drivers.
Most (all?) large systems developed using Erlang make heavy use of C for low-level code, leaving Erlang to manage the parts which tend to be complex in other languages, like controlling systems spread across several machines and implementing complex protocol logic.
1.5 Who uses Erlang for product development?The largest user of Erlang is Ericsson. Ericsson use it to write software used in telecommunications systems. Many (dozens) projects have used it, a particularly large one is the extremely scaleable AXD301 ATM switch. AXD301 has several hundred people working on it and the code volume has reached about 850 kloc of Erlang (and 1 Mloc of C/C++).
A few of the other companies using Erlang are
2600Hz (VoIP platform)
AdRoll (Real-time bidding, ad serving)
Bluetab Solutions (Event data collection)
Corelatus (Signalling in telecommuncations networks)
dqdp.net (in Latvian) (Web Services)
EE (British mobile operator, previously T-Mobile and one2one) (advanced call control services)
Facebook (Facebook chat backend)
Finnish Meteorological Institute (Data acquisition and real-time monitoring)
Gambit Research (High frequency trading in sports betting markets)
IDT corp. (Real-time least-cost routing expert systems)
IEISS. (Electronic financial instrument exchange software)
Klarna (Electronic payment systems)
Lindenbaum (Large scale voice conferencing)
Mitel (VoIP Services)
Mobilearts (GSM and UMTS services)
Netkit Solutions (Network Equipment Monitoring and Operations Support Systems)
Process-one (Jabber Messaging)
Quviq (Software Test Tool)
RAD (SSL accelerator, previously owned by Nortel, Alteon and Bluetail)
Schleibinger (Machine control of environmental testing machines)
Smarkets (Betting exchange and prediction market)
Telia (a telecomms operator)
Vail Systems (Interactive Voice Response systems)
Wavenet (SS7 and IVR applications)
Whatsapp (Messaging for smartphones)
If you want to be listed here, send me some mail: matthias@corelatus.com
1.6 Who uses Erlang for research and teaching?Many universities use Erlang at various levels. This list is far from exhaustive!
Ben-Gurion University (Israel) in the Communication Systems Engineering Department.
Heriot-Watt University in the UK.
Iligan Institute of Technology of the Mindanao State University in the Philippines.
IT University of Gothenburg in Gothenburg, Sweden.
KTH in Stockholm.
Kurgan State University in Russia.
The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia.
Technion—Israel Institute of Technology (Electrical Engineering Faculty).
Technische Universität Kaiserslautern in Germany, for research and in their distributed systems source.
Tecnológico de Monterrey, Campus Estado de México in the Programming Languages course.
Tufts University, USA, in the Concurrent Programming course.
University of A Coruña in Spain.
The University of Kent in the UK
University of Sheffield in the UK
University of Sydney, in a distributed stream processing engine.
University of Zagreb in Croatia, in the Concurrent Programming course and also for research.
Uppsala University in Sweden is home to the HiPE project.
If you want to be listed here, send me some mail: matthias@corelatus.com
1.7 Can I get commercial support for Erlang?Many consulting companies provide support and training courses, the most well-known one is Erlang-solutions.com .
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