
what's the best scalable language? - acheung

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gyro_robo
Define "scalable".

Trivially, Erlang; because the language and implementation, including Mnesia,
go together.

However, you might find its performance characteristics don't suit your
problem domain: it's not fast compared to C:

[http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4sandbox/benchmark.php?test=all⟨=hipe&lang2;=gcc](http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4sandbox/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=hipe&lang2=gcc)

Also you are forced to message-pass, which adds overhead of a processor
talking to itself; for some applications you want shared memory and parallel
computing rather than message-passing and concurrent computing.

You also might find that its behavior running on multiple nodes isn't optimal,
because it's a generic solution; you might do better with a specific solution
with a truncated feature set, written in a language with a faster runtime
(SBCL; C++; Haskell; etc.). You might also want guarantees of order, execution
time, or determinacy -- something else it doesn't give you.

Furthermore, you might find that it's not scalable on the programmer-end; more
people may have experience with Python, Ruby, or Lisp. Or it may lack
libraries you want, and thus not "scale" to cover certain types of
applications, given the constraint of human developer time.

So the answer is, "it depends".

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aston
Best language that scales? Or language that best scales?

