A while back I wrote the Comparing Elixir and Go post for Codeship. Every now and then something recirculates the post and my Twitter blows up.
One of the things I mention in that article was a story I came across when I was initially learning about Elixir, Erlang in the BEAM that talked about an occasion when hot loading was used to update a flight computer on a plane that was in the air. I’m trying to go back and dig up the reference for where I found it, but it’s been long enough and I’ve read enough that I can’t remember where I saw it. I thought it was on the Erlang wikipedia entry at some point.
If y’all could help me find it I’d appreciate it. I figured if anybody would know where I could find that reference it would be @sasajuric pragdave @rvirding@joeerl
Is it possible that this is one of those cases where in-flight hot code reloading for Erlang drones passes through enough tweets/blog-posts and transforms into a fact about the same for flight computers in airplanes?
There was a YouTube clip made by a company/organization called Feuerlabs (Ulf Wiger of gproc fame and other prominent Erlangers were/are part of it) that showed exactly that; a hot-code reload of some flight control system while the drone was in the air, fixing a bug. They’ve since taken it down and I’m not entirely sure why.
Are you sure it was an Erlang system? I’ve seen similar confusion in the past because someone mentioned Erlang-style hot code deployments are used in space probes, and that got misquoted like “Erlang deployments are used in space probes”.
On a side note on the same article, Facebook chat moved away from Erlang many years ago.
###Drone In-flight Firmware Upgrade
Exosense Flight Control - Live in-flight firmware upgrade.
Using Exosense and Erlang, we upgrade the flight control system while in the air.
Yea, I think that was referenced in the comments. I seem to remember there being a link to Quora post explaining that it was largely due to so much C++ infrastructure and tooling.
