Our team works on the Erlang programming language, libraries and tools. Our mission is modernizing and improving Erlang, and making it more efficient for WhatsApp and beyond.
Our biggest and the most challenging project is evolving Erlang into a modern statically typed programming language.
Our work is motivated by extremely successful and large-scale application of Erlang at WhatsApp. Our Messaging Infrastructure that powers fast and reliable message delivery for 2B+ users is written in Erlang.
Perhaps static typing on the BEAM backed by a huge company is the missing link for wider adoptionā¦ Iām hopeful, weāll see.
On another note, @rvirding has mentioned multiple times that dynamic typing was the solution to hot code upgrades, so Iām wondering if that property of erlang will be preserved- and also what other trade-offs had to be made (if any).
Well , thanks to Facebook the PHP core team finally decided to go full steam ahead and the result was PHP 7, that with types and without the JIT compiler from Facebook HACK was as faster. Maybe they felt āembarrassedā by how fast HACK was and how fast it was gaining traction.
Maybe with this move Facebook will also trigger a reaction from the Erlang core team to finally solve one of the major ādefectsā of the BEAM ecosystem, or maybe they will join forces?
I wrote it in quotes because they are not bugs or defects in the strict meaning of the word, but rather decisions that were made earlier in the context of what the language was created for, but that harm its evolution and adoption in the present.
NOTE: I am not an Erlang developer, just learning Elixir, but I think that both my concerns apply to Erlang and Elixir, but correct me if I am wrong.
The main ādefectsā for me are:
The usual lack of static typing, and please donāt tell me about Dializer, because itās not what people look for when they want static typing. You can say that is a strong dynamic typed language, but well I donāt want to go down that path, because we will not agree at any point in time.
Not easy to deploy as a standalone binary like Rust or Go.
I gave a talk at Code BEAM V last Thursday in which I explained motivation for our work on static typing for Erlang, and shared some very high-level details.
Iām interested to hear how community members feel this will play out in the Elixir space. Is it expected that static Erlang will be a compilation target for static Elixir, or that Elixir devs could simply use the Erlang syntax for types and pass it straight through to the compiler? I donāt anticipate that Iād be willing to trade Elixir for Erlang just to get types, but I do feel like many Elixir community members (including myself) would be very anxious to use these static types if itās feasible.
Iām looking forward to this, and Iām really eager to see if itās just types for the sake of type checking, or if we can actually do something about the types, like protocols with static dispatch, module types to make sure that the module behind an atom provides a set of functions, etc.
One potential benefit is also performance? - given BeamAsm is coming out - down the line (if I understand correctly) a static typed lang can enable more optimizations to happen in the JIT? and thus perform significantly betterā¦
If Iām not mistaking I think performance is what will drive us all toward a static typed BEAM langā¦ (in a few years obviously)
Hello all! A lot of people have been asking us about this lately - thank you for all your interest! It is a good time to give an update on this.
We were planning to release an early prototype in November, but unfortunately things are taking longer. Typing Erlang is a hard problem! We are actively working on it, but at this point we are not ready to commit to any timeline for open-sourcing it. Weāll keep the community posted as we make progress on this.
To share a bit more details. We made good progress on prototyping, and now approaching solving the most difficult problem - figuring out an efficient path for adopting static typing for existing Erlang code. Solving this problem may influence the design. In the end, we decided that we need to get a good grasp on the technical direction before open-sourcing and sharing technical details.
fwiw, my main interest in static typing for Erlang is dev efficiency. Thatās a hard enough problem that itās probably easiest solved with singular focus.
Iāve never been more efficient than in elixir. Same goes for pretty much any Lisp.
What code took me longest to write? purescript (essentially a slight evolution of Haskell). You can write extremely concise code but the endless type headaches and obscure error messagesā¦ I never felt less efficient. Every line of code seemed like a hard-won battle. And whenever I needed to rewrite something, the effort to reframe an idea was huge.
Which is funny because the Node.js project I had started from had not suffered from this problem. I love purescript but its elegance comes at a hefty price.
I personally think type systems are overrated, really. For me it would be sufficient if an API could selectively enforce type restrictions at its boundaries. Anything else just quickly erodes the creative process of shaping and rewriting the code.
It got into my radar after listening podcast that had author Chris Keathley as guest. Itās used by his current employer Bleacher Report, so it should be quite battle tested.
