Erlang – Software for a Concurrent World

Abstract

This talk is about Erlang and Concurrency Oriented Programming. We start with a short history of Erlang and of shared state and message passing concurrency. We argue that it is impossible to make fault-tolerant systems using mutable shared state concurrency models. We explain the thinking behind what has become known as “Erlang style concurrency” and show the relation to Concurrency Oriented Programming. We take a brief detour and talk about the commercial spread of Erlang, highlighting some of the more successful products and companies based on Erlang. We talk about the general problem of programming multicore computers and show how the goal of achieving factor N speedups on N-core processors with no change to the code, is being realised.