This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Java Buzz
by Brian McCallister.
Original Post: Russ Nails It Re: Erlang
Feed Title: Waste of Time
Feed URL: http://kasparov.skife.org/blog/index.rss
Feed Description: A simple waste of time and weblog experiment
Russ makes a passing remark regarding Erlang while poking angrily at Java which nails the reason I think most folks are really interested in it.
The reason people are looking at Erlang is not because its beautiful syntax, great documentation, or up-to-date libraries. Trust me. It's because the Erlang VM can run for long periods of time, scaling linearly across cores or processors filling the same niche that Java does right now on the server.
If you are resource constrained (pronounced "hosting providers charge obscene amounts of money for RAM") you don't want to run Java. You really don't want to run Java. It is an operational thing. I have ejabberd running on my personal server and am annoyed at the 13 megs resident it consumes after a month uptime. I could use OpenFire (Diego likes it.) but it sits at 40 megs at startup. Now this isn't apples to apples, they have different feature sets, but it feels about right.
Java has grown to fit the constraints in which the Java Customer Process members like it to be used: running Enterprise Services on fairly beefy hardware. If this is your situation, woot, go forth and win. It is, however, a situation ripe for disruption.
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