Concurrent Programming with Erlang

Abstract

The development of SMPs during the last years has led to an increasing interest software development for multi-processor architectures. While many programming languages such as C or Java require additional concepts like STM to cope with multi-threading in an easy and non error-prone way, Erlang’s features make it ideal for developing scalable application and use SMP as best as possible.

Erlang has been developed by Ericsson in the early 1990s and been used to develop large-scale telecoms systems ever since. Recently it has been used in many other areas where scalability matters, such as for messaging and data distribution. The language features allow programmers to concentrate on problem solving by abstracting from the underlying multi-processor hardware.

This talk will give a general overview of the Erlang’s language features and highlight its use in some well-known open source projects.