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Distributed Erlang

The Erlang programming language is known for three things: - Concurrency - Fault tolerance - Distribution The cool thing is that all three of these things are both built into the language/runtime itself, but they're also all more or less "emergent" properties of the underlying design choices that were made when the language was created. The Actor Model Erlang is based on the Actor Model, which is a model of computation that was first described by Carl Hewitt in the 1970s.

Because each process is scheduled independently by the Erlang Virtual Machine, there isn't a need to worry about locking any kind of main thread: One of the confusing things about OTP is that it's often referred to as a "framework", but it's really more of a set of abstractions that make it easier to write fault-tolerant and scalable systems in Erlang. When you're writing distributed systems, you need to be aware of the speed of light, and the fact that it takes time for messages to travel between nodes.

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