Introduction
New hardware is increasingly parallel, so new programming languages must support concurrency or they will die.
“The way the processor industry is going is to add more and more cores, but nobody knows how to program those things. I mean, two, yeah; four, not really; eight, forget it.” —Steve Jobs, Apple [1]
Well, Steve was wrong; we do know how to program multicores. We program them in Erlang, and many of our programs just go faster as we add more cores.
Erlang was designed from the bottom up to program concurrent, distributed, fault-tolerant, scalable, soft, real-time systems. Soft real-time systems are systems such as telephone exchanges, banking systems, and so on, where rapid response times are important but it’s not a disaster ...
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