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Erlang: The Movie

uncertainyesterday · 174.7K views · 2012-05-03 · 11:32

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Overview

A short Ericsson film demoing Erlang, showing concurrent processes, debugging tools, and hot code reloading, including crashing parts of a running system while calls continue.

On Hacker News

A beloved classic that HN recommends as the quickest way to see why Erlang is special.

Recommended by 4 HN people across 4 months · HN mentions 2013–2026

Topics

Functional programmingDistributed systems
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erlangconcurrencyhot code reloadingfault toleranceericsson

What people said

lelf · 2013-05 · Strong recommendation

And if you haven't seen it, here is some classic. “Erlang: the Movie”: — [VIDEO] And sequel “Erlang: the Movie II”: — [LINK] Don't think wtf. Just watch.

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StudentStuff · 2018-09 · Recommendation

It is one of the core features of Erlang (a language developed by Ericsson), being able to rewrite code in production, with errors/crashes that break one thread not affecting another. Obligatory link to Erlang: The Movie (10min)- [VIDEO] Note that they start crashing things in Erlang around minute 7, and fix them shortly thereafter. Meanwhile, their setup keeps calls that weren't directly involved in the crash alive and running unaffected.

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randomstudent · 2017-08 · Recommendation

The author doesn't talk a lot about preemptive scheduling, which is probably the best thing about the Erlang virtual machine. This video explains what preemptive scheduling is and why it is extremely useful: [LINK] First, the speaker creates an application endpoint that runs into an infinite loop on invalid input. Then, he shows how that doesn't block the rest of the requests. Using native BEAM (EDIT: BEAM = EVM = Erlang Virtual Machine) tools, he looks for the misbehaving process (the one running the infinite loop), prints some debug information and kills it. It's pretty impressive. Another great (and lighter) resource, is "Erlang the Movie" ( [VIDEO] ). It shows the power of concurrency through independent processes, the default debug tools, and the power of hot code reloading. Don't miss the twist at the end.

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Sources

Video by uncertainyesterday, played through YouTube.

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