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Amazon and Google Discover Erlang (IMDB is switching from Perl to Erlang) (perfdynamics.blogspot.com)
15 points by nickb on July 9, 2008 | hide | past | favorite | 8 comments



> Somewhat ironically, Erlang was released by Ericsson as open source in 1998 because an internal executive decision was made to go with "standards" instead.

Nice technical trivial pursuit factoid


I'm not so sure if SDB is implemented in Erlang.

Check out http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2007/10/amazons_dynamo.h...

It says:

"In Dynamo, each storage node has three main software components: request coordination, membership and failure detection, and a local persistence engine. All these components are implemented in Java."

"Engines that are in use are Berkeley Database (BDB) Transactional Data Store, BDB Java Edition, MySQL, and an in-memory buffer with persistent backing store."

"All communications are implemented using Java NIO channels. "

I doubt they wrote Dynamo in Java and then converted the whole thing to Erlang.

Also, Erlang does not fit in the 'eventual consistency' and 'failure is an option' model that Amazon like to promote.


Amazon has stated that simpledb does not run on dynamo though so this is all moot.


Link to original blogpost on this subject:

http://vertonghen.wordpress.com/2008/07/05/erlang-or-utility...


According to the post the extent of Google discovering erlang is erlang style concurrency in Google Gears. To me erlang the language and erlang style concurrency are two very different things.


Looks like blatant misinformation to me. As to sources:

* Amazon SimpleDB on Erlang (friend of a developer): http://www.satine.org/archives/2007/12/13/amazon-simpledb/

* IMDb on Java/Erlang (a job posting): http://www.computerjobs.com/job_display.aspx?jobid=2052172

* Gears on Erlang: N/A


I can confirm that SimpleDB is Erlang (with Berkeley DB as the persistence engine), or at least I can say that one of the lead developers of SimpleDB has told me that this is the case.


Is there any other sourcing about IMDB moving to Erlang? This is the first (and last) that I've heard that.




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