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Three cheers to the Erlang Runtime System

Virding's First Rule of Programming says "Any sufficiently complicated concurrent program in another language contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Erlang." This is funny, and true, but why is it true? Why is Erlang is unmatched in its sweet spots of reliability, concurrency and distribution? Other languages borrow bits and pieces from Erlang, but none come close. Why? Because it's not the language that matters. The great power of Erlang bubbles up from the Erlang Runtime System (ERTS) which in many ways is more like an operating system than a language runtime. In this session we will explore the design, the internals, and the exposed primitives of the ERTS. Without these primitives, building OTP would have been...difficult. Without the ERTS, Erlang itself would be a bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Erlang. In our dive we will pretend we are Microsoft attempting to build an Erlang-inspired operating system. We will see why it's that big of a job.

About Bryan Hunter

Bryan Hunter is a geek, a partner at Firefly Logic, founder of NashFP and a Microsoft MVP in C#. Bryan first learned of Erlang in 2007 while on a six-week consulting engagement in Oslo, Norway. In a sea of leaky C++, tower-of-babel class hierarchies and endless event storms there was one patch of calm: it was an Erlang system that had been running for years with no bugs and with no downtime. He was stunned. When he got back to Nashville, he picked up Joe Armstrong’s book and has been digging in ever since. Bryan is obsessed with Lean, functional programming and CQRS. He speaks on each of these subjects tirelessly at conferences, user groups and bars. You can say hi to Bryan on Twitter (@bryan_hunter), and see what Firefly Logic is all about here: www.fireflylogic.com