Maybe not yet, but it’s interesting to see that Erlang gets mentioned in the Scaling Twitter presentation. Apparently Twitter used the ejabberd Jabber/XMPP server as their instant messaging platform. They also mention RabbitMQ, an Enterprise-class messaging system built in Erlang, as a possible high performance platform for their message passing infrastructure.

Recently Erlang is gaining a lot of popularity, probably due to the publishing of the Programming Erlang book from the Pragmatic Programmer. In this article about the Erlang future, Joe Armstrong explaing why Erlang Concurrency Oriented Programming will be much more important from now on, since we’re moving to a multi core processing era!

Nobody can predict the future, but I’m going to make a few informed guesses.

Let’s suppose Intel is right: let’s suppose that the Keifer project succeeds. If this happens, then 32 core processors will appear on the market as soon as 2009/2010.

This comes as no surprise; Sun already ships the Niagara with 8 cores running 4 hyperthreads per core (which is equivalent to 32 cores).

This is a development that makes Erlang programmers very happy. They have been waiting 20 years for this to happen, and now it’s payback time.

Here’s the good news for Erlang programmers:

Your Erlang program should just run N times faster on an N core processor

SlideAware has created a slick web-based solution for managing the life cycle of Powerpoint presentations. They started using Python, then they switched to Rails, and finally settled on pure Erlang. Using Erlang, they replaced a combination of Lighttpd + RoR + SQLlite + XMLRpc + Jython + Lucene with the much simpler and highly scalable stack of Yaws + Mnesia + Erlang.

They wrote an interesting article describing their technology choices. Check it out at this article on SlideAware’s blog.

[from Yariv’s Blog]