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On Apr 7, 2009, at 10:30 PM, kowsik <[email protected]> wrote:
I'm curious, what part of the stdlib (OTP) does Couch actually use and
what exactly about the Erlang VM is special?
The stdlib is important, but I think being a functional language is
what actually matters.
It makes it simple to do all the things we do while keeping the memory
footprint small, for one thing.
Personally I like Erlang because it is easy to reason about. Obj
oriented behavior is great for domain models, but for infrastructure
stuff functional langs are a pretty good fit, for a variety of reasons.
I, personally, am pretty
comfortable with a wide array of languages (Erlang excluded for now)
and to me the conceptual idea of persistent BTree's with map/reduce
over stdin/stdout to view servers matters way more than what language
it's written in currently. It's exactly why I chose to write the
CouchDB emulator in JavaScript and also why I'm super comfortable
working with CouchDB. I never see or encounter Erlang. All I see,
functionally, is REST + JS and I can extrapolate the inner workings
from there.
While I'm not necessarily advocating CouchDB to be rewritten in
another language, I am wondering the choice of Erlang over other more
"prevalent" languages. Given the time I have at hand, I definitely
don't see myself contributing a lot in Erlang, though I could help in
the view server that's in JavaScript.
Thoughts?
K.
On Tue, Apr 7, 2009 at 3:41 AM, Jan Lehnardt <[email protected]> wrote:
On 7 Apr 2009, at 10:12, Wout Mertens wrote:
Hi everyone,
I've always been worried about the fact that CouchDB runs on
Erlang. After
all, the Erlang ecosystem isn't that large or well-established in
(non-telephony) enterprise settings.
[...]
So I'm wondering what everybody here thinks.
To me Erlang is three things: The language, the stdlib (OTP) and
the VM
(BEAM). These three things make Erlang the success it is (in my
opinion).
Strip out BEAM and replace with JVM and you get something
"less" (in my
opinion). I understand that running on the JVM and using the Java
ecosystem
is a bonus for some people, but it is not for me*.
In case it is not clear, this is just my opinion. :)
* There are cases that can be easily found where I'd decide that
using the
JVM is a good idea. CouchDB is not one of them.
Cheers
Jan
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