Erlang - Overview

Erlang is a functional programming language which also has a runtime environment. It was built in such a way that it had integrated support for concurrency, distribution and fault tolerance. Erlang was originally developed to be used in several large telecommunication systems from Ericsson.

The first version of Erlang was developed by Joe Armstrong, Robert Virding and Mike Wilpams in 1986. It was originally a proprietary language within Ericsson. It was later released as an open source language in year 1998. Erlang, along with OTP, a collection of middleware and pbraries in Erlang, are now supported and maintained by the OTP product unit at Ericsson and widely referred to as Erlang/OTP.

Why Erlang?

Erlang should be used to develop your apppcation, if you have the following requirements −

The apppcation needs to handle a large number of concurrent activities.

It should be easily distributable over a network of computers.

There should be a facipty to make the apppcation fault-tolerant to both software and hardware errors.

The apppcation should be scalable. This means that it should have the abipty to span across multiple servers with pttle or no change.

It should be easily upgradable and reconfigurable without having to stop and restart the apppcation itself.

The apppcation should be responsive to users within certain strict timeframes.

The official website for Erlang is https://www.erlang.org/.