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by Daniel Berger.
Original Post: I got yer scalability right here, pal!
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In this Apache vs Yaws test, we see just how powerful Erlang really is. Blam.
I've been continuing through Joe Armstrong's "Programming Erlang", and I have to say it's been a real eye opener. It has pretty much shattered my world view on the significance of native threads. The whole native thread programming paradigm is just an error prone mess that most of us can't handle and, in fact, won't scale well in the long run anyway.
You see, in Erlang there are parallel processes (to include SMP), but no locks, no synchronized methods and no possibility of shared memory corruption, since there is no shared memory. It's just a better approach to COP (Concurrent Oriented Programming).
This is not to suggest that native threads shouldn't still be supported. You still want it for wrapping various C functions, and embedding. But that's about it, really, as far as I can tell.
But I digress. I've really been enjoying the book and the language. The syntax didn't put me off the way OCaml did, and I can actually see myself diving into this language more seriously in the future.
Now I'm starting to wonder about a Process.new for Ruby...