A History of Erlang外文电子书籍.pdfVIP

A History of Erlang Joe Armstrong Ericsson AB joe.armstrong@ Abstract operations occur. Telephony software must also operate in the “soft Erlang was designed for writing concurrent programs that “run real-time” domain, with stringent timing requirements for some op- forever.” Erlang uses concurrent processes to structure the program. erations, but with a more relaxed view of timing for other classes These processes have no shared memory and communicate by of operation. asynchronous message passing. Erlang processes are lightweight When Erlang started in 1986, requirements for virtually zero and belong to the language, not the operating system. Erlang has down-time and for in-service upgrade were limited to rather small mechanisms to allow programs to change code “on the fly” so that and obscure problem domains. The rise in popularity of the Inter- programs can evolve and change as they run. These mechanisms net and the need for non-interrupted availability of services has ex- simplify the construction of software for implementing non-stop tended the class of problems that Erlang can solve. For example, building a non-stop web server, with dynamic code upgrade, han- systems. This paper describes the history of Erlang. Material for the pa- dling millions of reques