

Erlang/OTP R14B02 has been released. - pietrofmaggi
http://www.erlang.org/download/otp_src_R14B02.readme

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nivertech
OTP-8941 - erlang halfword emulator (32-bit VM with 64-bit address space for
non-gc data - binaries & ETS) is great fit for my data-intensive project.

Repeating type specs twice was very annoying - now edoc will pick up type
specs.

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icey
For those of us that don't do Erlang, is this a big deal?

~~~
jerf
If you are not an existing Erlang user, there is no sudden change here that
should drive you to try it specially. Erlang is a mature platform and is
beyond that in the same way that Python or Ruby is beyond it; yes, the next
version of Python or Ruby will have some nice improvements but they are
extremely unlikely to have something that will make a non-Python or Ruby user
suddenly cry out "Yes, suddenly this is an acceptable solution where it never
was before!"

The big changes that struck me were for scalability of deployed systems, which
a new user won't care about as they don't have deployed systems by definition.
The 32-bit Erlang process memory space in a greater 64-bit system is really
interesting in a number of ways. It's certainly a common Erlang deployment
pattern where no one Erlang process needs more than even a handful of
megabytes necessarily, but the system as a whole runs past several gigabytes
by sheer scale of accumulated processes that themselves may only have hundreds
of bytes allocated. I've also got a use for smaller SSL footprints.

~~~
jeffdavis
"It's certainly a common Erlang deployment pattern where no one Erlang process
needs more than even a handful of megabytes necessarily, but the system as a
whole runs past several gigabytes by sheer scale of accumulated processes that
themselves may only have hundreds of bytes allocated."

From the release notes, it looks like the 32-bit emulator restricts the total
for _all_ processes to 4GB. Only ETS tables and off-heap binaries don't count
toward that total.

~~~
jerf
Thanks for the correction, re-reading it that seems likely. Less useful, then.
Not useless (you can "cluster" Erlang with multiple instances on one system),
but less useful.

~~~
nivertech
It's less usefull if you running a Web or Comet server (were you have one or
more processes per client).

It's usefull if you writing a control middleware handling a lot of data
buffers, i.e. NoSQL database or MQ server.

