Choosing the Erlang Ecosystem for Developing the Applications of the Future!

CHOOSING THE ERLANG ECOSYSTEM
FOR DEVELOPING THE APPLICATIONS
OF THE FUTURE!
Stavros Aronis
© 2019 – Erlang Solutions Ltd. 1
@Vahnatai

INTRO: 
LAUNCHING ON THE SUPER BOWL
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© 2019 – Erlang Solutions Ltd.

3
https://codesync.global/speaker/keith-elder/

KEITH’S STORY
➤ Loan & mortgage company
➤ Launching a new product via a Super Bowl ad
➤ Getting ready for huge traﬃc
➤ Requirements:
• Hard deadline (~ 300 days)
• 30 000 transactions / second
• 1-2 ms response time
• …

KEITH’S STORY
➤ “Let’s use Erlang”
➤ How come?
• During “innovation time” people were reading
Bruce Tate’s “Seven Languages in Seven Weeks”
• Erlang got two senior engineers very excited
➤ Still…
• For a critical piece of their stack…
• … with no prior production experience
• … were they mad?

WHO IS USING ERLANG?
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(DR.) STAVROS ARONIS!
From: Athens, GR
Living in: Uppsala, SE
Interests: NonViolent Communication, Rationality, Privacy
Hobbies: Music (accordion, student brass band, arrange, sing)
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COOL! ANYONE ELSE?
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ERLANG SOLUTIONS
➤ 90+ experts
➤ 4+ oﬃces in Europe & the Americas 
(We Are Hiring!)
➤ 20+ yrs of experience
➤ Diverse clients, from startups to Fortune 500’s
➤ Passionate about Erlang & Elixir prog. languages.
➤ Building innovative, scalable & resilient systems
➤ Member of Trifork Group of tech companies, adding
value to over 300+ clients.
➤ Powering communities via Code Sync family of
global tech events.

NO, REALLY, WHO IS USING ERLANG?
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WHAT PEOPLE USUALLY THINK…

… AND A GLIMPSE OF THE REALITY

BACKGROUND (1980s)
➤ Ericsson’s “best seller” AXE
telephone exchanges
(switches) required large 
eﬀort to develop and maintain
software.
➤ How to make programming
such devices easier?
➤ Let’s try to design a
language…
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REQUIREMENTS
➤ Huge numbers of concurrent activities
➤ Time constraints (deadlines)
➤ Distribution over several computers
➤ Continuous operation over years - 
Zero-downtime maintenance
➤ Tolerance for hardware & software failures
- Bjarne Däcker  
Former CSLab manager (Ericsson) 
(Lic. Thesis, Nov 2010)
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LET’S TAKE A CLOSER LOOK…

DESIGNED FOR SEVERAL DOMAINS!
… not just telecom!

WHY?
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© 2019 – Erlang Solutions Ltd.© 2018 – Erlang Solutions Ltd.

FUNCTIONAL
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FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING

PATTERN MATCHING
sum([]) -> 0;
sum([H|T]) -> H + sum(T).

BEAUTY!
qsort([Head|Tail]) ->
Smaller =
qsort([X || X <- Tail, X =< Head]),
Larger =
qsort([Y || Y <- Tail, Y > Head]),
Smaller ++ [Head] ++ Larger;
qsort([]) ->
[].
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PATTERN MATCHING
<< IpVers:4, HLen:4, 
SrvcType:8, TotLen:16, 
ID:16, Flgs:3, FragOff:13, 
TTL:8, Proto:8, HdrChkSum:16, 
SrcIP:32, DestIP:32, 
RestDgram/binary >>

LIBRARIES
➤ Standard libraries in Erlang/OTP
➤ lists
➤ sets
➤ (di)graphs
➤ strings
➤ maps
➤ math
➤ io
➤ …

CONCURRENT
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JOE ARMSTRONG’S TENETS
➤ The world is concurrent
➤ Things in the world don’t “share data”
➤ Things communicate with messages
➤ Communications (and things) fail

PROCESSES (“GREEN” THREADS)
P1
P2
spawn(Fun)
P3
spawn(Fun)
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MESSAGE PASSING
P1
P2 P3
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MESSAGE PASSING
P1
P2 P3
foo
P1 ! foo
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MESSAGE PASSING
P1
P2 P3
foo
P1 ! foo
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MESSAGE PASSING
P1
P2 P3
foo
receive
foo -> …
end
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MESSAGE PASSING
P1
P2 P3
foo
receive
foo -> …
end
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FAULT TOLERANT
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THERE WILL BE FAIL
➤ Unexpected inputs
➤ Unexpected delays
➤ Unexpected… anything!
➤ Let it crash!

MONITORS
➤ ‘If this process exits, send me 
a message’
➤ Perfect for synchronous requests!

LINKS
P1
P3
P2
P4
37

LINKS
P1
P3
P2
P4
38

LINKS
P1
P3
P2
P4
39

SUPERVISION TREES
S1
W3W2 S4
W6W5
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THE WORLD IS CONCURRENT
"Concurrency in the 80s? It was probably too underground for you." 
-Hipster @joeerl #erlang - @jessegumm (2 Feb 2014)
https://twitter.com/jessegumm/status/430016389378625536
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DISTRIBUTED
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THERE WILL BE MORE FAIL
➤ Plug is pulled
➤ Fiber is severed
➤ OS panics
➤ …

NODE DISCOVERY & CONNECTION
➤ Explicit or automatic, on-demand
➤ Fully connected mesh

TRANSPARENT MESSAGE PASSING
➤ Remote PIDs
➤ ““Little”” eﬀort to make a program 
distributed

ERLANG/OTP & THE BEAM
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THE ERLANG/OTP DISTRIBUTION
➤ Erlang is the core language
➤ Erlang/OTP is the implementation
➤ Open Telecom Platform
➤ Line is hard to discern sometimes

THE BEAM
➤ Virtual machine for Erlang programs
➤ Support for ‘all of the above’
➤ SMP/multicore
➤ Ports for working with other programs
➤ Native C code support
➤ …

EVEN MORE OTP LIBRARIES
➤ Behaviours (gen_server, supervisor, …)
➤ mnesia
➤ httpc
➤ crypto, ssl, ssh
➤ common_test
➤ unicode
➤ snmp
➤ wx
➤ hipe, dialyzer

THE ERLANG ECOSYSTEM
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WHY BUILD OTHER LANGUAGES?
➤ Fun
➤ Accessible
➤ Explore other design choices
➤ Can be based on
➤ The BEAM
➤ Erlang
➤ Erlang/OTP

NOTABLE MENTIONS
➤ LFE (Lisp Flavoured Erlang)
➤ Alpaca (ML)
➤ Efene (Alt syntax)
➤ Luerl (Lua)
➤ Erlog (Prolog)
➤ Clojerl (Clojure)
➤ Fez (F#)
➤ ?? (Forth)

ELIXIR
➤ Ruby-like syntax
➤ Many Erlang libraries and interfaces 
standardised, rewritten and extended
➤ Extensive set of build tools and packages
➤ Several notable projects
➤ Phoenix
➤ Ecto
➤ Hex

ELIXIR AND OTHER ECOSYSTEMS
➤ Broadway, a library for data ingestion
pipelines
➤ Amazon SQS, Google Cloud Pub/Sub,
RabbitMQ

THE ERLANG ECOSYSTEM

CONCLUSION
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JOIN THE BEST!

60
https://codesync.global/speaker/keith-elder/

61

FIND OUT MORE ON TWITTER
➤ #CODEBEAMSF
➤ #CODEBEAMSTO
➤ @CodeBEAMio
➤ #MyTopdogStatus
➤ @ErlangSolutions
➤ @Vahnatai
Thank you!Special thanks to: Francesco Cesarini, Robert Virding

Choosing the Erlang Ecosystem for Developing the Applications of the Future!

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Choosing the Erlang Ecosystem for Developing the Applications of the Future!