

Erlang/OTP R14B is now out - pietrofmaggi
http://www.erlang.org/download/otp_src_R14B.readme

======
pietrofmaggi
From the Erlang mailing list:

"This release is mainly a stabilization of the R14A release (which was a beta)
but there are some new functionality also."

~~~
dLuna
Standard release schedule for Erlang/OTP. Same thing with R13A, and so on
backward (except that the A releases have not previously been available
outside of Ericsson (and had the name P rather than A)).

The R14B release is the real release of R14. Will then be incremented with
R14B-1 etc.

I would recommend Erlang developers to use the B releases in development, but
wait for the B-1 release before upgrading production servers.

------
compumike
Use the torrent for faster downloads...
[http://www.erlang.org/download/torrents/otp_src_R14B.tar.gz....](http://www.erlang.org/download/torrents/otp_src_R14B.tar.gz.torrent)
which is linked prominently from erlang.org's downloads page.

Actually, what I find most interesting is that looking at their tracker stats:
<http://www.erlang.org/stats/torrent.html> reveals surprisingly small download
counts. It isn't clear when the download counts were last reset (or if this is
accurate at all?), but so far, only 13 people have completed a download of
this latest build via the torrent, and at most a few hundred of earlier
versions. Interesting way to estimate the size of the "active" Erlang
community?

~~~
mononcqc
This doesn't hold account of people installing it through packages or
compiling from the github repositories or downloading the flat file without a
torrent.

~~~
compumike
Understood. I suspect flat file is #1 (although it's a big file and the
erlang.org server isn't on the world's fastest pipe). I doubt too many "active
users" use distro packages because of how out of date they often are. But to
me, just for an order of magnitude estimate, it suggests an active Erlang
community of perhaps a few thousand users. Just helps me put a number on it
when I had no reference previously. You probably have your own estimates based
on your traffic stats... and thanks for your Learn You Some Erlang tutorial:
<http://learnyousomeerlang.com/> !

~~~
mononcqc
Yeah, Learn You Some Erlang gets an average of 4800 unique visitors (or 41500
page views) a month according to awstats.

There are about 100 (mostly idling) users in the #erlang channel on freenode
and a few hundreds on the mailing lists. There are 1,800 subscribers to
r/erlang on reddit. You have 719 watchers of the Erlang/OTP project just on
github. Trapexit's project tracker has a bit more than 1450 projects
(<http://projects.trapexit.org/web/>) there.

Note that it's been a few versions since Ubuntu started shipping with a
minimal version of Erlang to allow CouchDB to be used there, so the repository
stats likely show a whole damn lot of users, so it'd be hard to count how many
developers you have precisely.

A few thousand developers might be a good estimate, although those would only
be the vocal, active ones.

------
lzw
Please advise on when erlang is good for production. They have a bit more
frequent releases, it seems, an I'd expect.

Is it feasible to install R14B and stick with it until R15B? Or do i need to
be installing the -1 ets as well?

Also, is there no autoupdatable ubuntu package so that I can at least install
security patches?

~~~
matthiasl
Companies with telecom products are generally conservative about switching
Erlang versions. Most of Corelatus' production systems run R11B-5. Quite a few
still run R9C-2. There's no compelling reason to upgrade them, there are
thousands of those systems in dozens of countries and most run billing
systems. They typically run for years at a time and only get upgraded in
conjunction with a larger system upgrade.

It's not like you sit there typical 'apt-get update' a couple of times a day
to see if there's anything new you might want...

On the other hand, people who are new to the language generally like to use
the very latest because it contains the most features. E.g. later versions
have increasingly good SMP support, which may be important if you're working
on something which has to scale across many cores, but it's completely
irrelevant to me because our hardware only runs Erlang on one core.

My suggestion for a starting point: if you're just developing, follow the R14
sequence, i.e. every time a new one gets release, download it, compile and
install from source. If you're ready to deploy now, use R13B04 and let others
find the bugs in R14.

Potential biases: I work at Corelatus. I've worked for Ericsson. I maintain
the Erlang FAQ.

------
c00p3r
This is where Node.js and Clojure fanboys should learn from. First ones, about
what is real concurrency, second ones - what is a functional programming (as
opposed to code imperative stuff in a funny lisp-like systax). ^_^

~~~
jneira
why so many comments starting with a "fanboyism" criticism are perfect
examples of fanboyism???

~~~
c00p3r
I don't know about why so many, but my own comments are based on a some sort
of a cognitive dissonance between what I read in the related mailing lists and
in classic CS books like SCIP or what I've learnt from a Berkeley's courses.

