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FREE EVENT: QCon in Finance eXchange: Erik Stenman on Erlang Makes Money go Round
Erlang Makes Money go Round
In this talk Erik will give a short introduction to Erlang, arguing for why it is so well suited for building high availability financial systems. He will present some key features of Erlang which have helped in making Kreditor a success. The talk will also touch on the downsides of using Erlang and some lessons learned from building a start-up with Erlang technology. Finally, Erik will give some advice on when to use Erlang and when not to.
Review:
The Erlang language is a preferable choice for concurrency-oriented programming. After a brief introduction to the language, Erik Stenman, developer of the HiPE compiler for Erlang, talks about Erlang’s role in Kreditor’s success in providing online invoice solutions.
The language was developed at Ericsons’s computer science lab, originally to provide zero-downtime solutions for telephone exchanges. Therefore, it needed to support high availability and concurrency and needed to provide real time, distributed and continuous operation. The software also needed to be distributed in order to be fault-tolerant. It supports rapid development, has dynamic typing, and utilizes a built-in distributed database. There is no shared state. It is possible to dynamically upload modules on runtime without getting any down time. Additionally, the shell is interactive and scalability is high.
When new functionality is necessary, new components should be added to the application. Storage space is cheap, so every event in the system should be logged and analysed later if things go wrong in the future.
There are also some downsides to using Erlang. It has not yet reached mainstream status, and there are few existing libraries. It is also difficult to find programmers who are experienced with Erlang.
Review by Eren Aykin
ABOUT ERIK STENMAN
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Erik Stenman has been programming for fun since 1980, and for profit since 1989 when he started his first company. He received his Master of Science in Computer Science in 1996 from Uppsala University. Erik was one of the driving forces behind the th
More about Erik Stenman
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PODCAST ERLANG MAKES MONEY GO ROUND
This session took part at the FREE EVENT: QCon in Finance eXchange. You can view the other 8 podcasts here.
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