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I was reading the  high scalability blog this morning, and stumbled upon a presentation regarding erlang at facebook.

Erlang - it’s one of those lesser known languages. The only reason that it had caught my eye was because (thank to RB) I’m a big fan of Wings3D, a a cross-platform 3D modeling program. FaceBook uses it for their chat.

There were a couple things that popped out at me in the presentation.

• FaceBook Chat was born out of a hackathon
• “Cheap Parallelism at a Massive Scale”
• Fault Isolation
• Erlang is now more prevalent in the industry

Hackathons: <– Are awesome. I actually intend to to a more in depth post on the idea soon, but for right now I’ll leave you with a short description. Stay up late, code what you love, get stuff done.

Parallelism: It’s cheap, and it scales well. What more could you ask for? Keep in mind the shift towards moving into the cloud. I’m sure we’ll see a lot more of erlang here.

Fault Isolation: Bugs in software don’t destroy everything. C/C++ segmentation faults take down the OS process and the server state, while erlang badmatch takes down only an erlang process. As an additionally note, I hate segfaults. I once lost a whole letter grade in a class because I was missing the letter “l” in “-lpthread” in my makefile. This caused segmentation faults for days. The project was the final project for the class. I got it to work perfectly, but it was a couple days late because I had a difficult time tracking down the source of the segfault.

Prevalence: The final thing that I found interesting about this presentation was that it now seems as though erlang is much more prevalent in the industry. The presentation describes how, at the beginning of the project, erlang was quite obscure and how now it has a maturing community.  No where is the grwoth in popularity attributed to FaceBook, but I’d like to think it is. FaceBook Chat started in January of 2007, but did not become a “real” project until that fall. At that point, it had 4 developers dedicated to it. It began to roll live in April 0f 2008. I like the idea that a small group of dedicated developers can, from a humble start, drive a language into the main stream.

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