Top all-time · #721
Erlang Solutions
Company blog · erlang-solutions.com/blogprogrammingsystems
Erlang Solutions is the company blog at erlang-solutions.com, writing about programming and systems. Since 2011, 88 different Hacker News readers have linked it 193 times, most often “Erlang 19.0 Garbage Collector”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-19, and you can follow it by feed.
We build transformative solutions for the world’s most ambitious companies. We're experts at building massively scalable, distributed systems.
Most-linked posts?
- Erlang 19.0 Garbage Collector5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2016-04-08
- /blog/which-companies-are-using-erlang-and-why-mytopdogstatus/4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2022-01-11
- Twenty Years of Open Source Erlang: A Retrospective from the trenches3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2018-12-08
- Let’s Talk Concurrency: Panel with Sir Tony Hoare, Joe Armstrong, Carl Hewitt3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-02-19
- Tutorial: Build a complete iOS messaging app using XMPPFramework – part 13 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2016-12-01
- Which companies are using Erlang, and why?3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-09-12
- /downloads/download-erlang-otp3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2013-02-27
- 21 XMPP use-cases and the best ways to achieve them3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-03-24
- HCA Healthcare used the BEAM to fight Covid – Code BEAM V Talk review2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2023-05-13
- Erlang Garbage Collector2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-11-30
What Hacker News says?
That’s an “it depends” for me. I do always want the transcript, but let’s appreciate that a competent lecturer brings a topic to life. You don’t have to be Richard Feynman, but you do have to reveal and conceptualise at a pace an informed and inquisitive brain latches onto. Most video content is not at this level; it’s often either glibly oversimplified (content marketing), bogged down in minutiae (how-to guides), o…
Comment linking /blog/let-s-talkconcurrency-panel-discussion-with-sir-tony-hoare-joe-armstrong-and-carl-hewitt.html
on “Cloudflare TV”Submitted An introduction to RabbitMQ as a story · 586 points
HN discussionI understand it’s poorly promoted by the biggest users. But more of the web and world infrastructure runs on it than you realise. Here’s an old post with some examples - https://www.erlang-solutions.com/blog/which-companies-are-us...
Comment linking /blog/which-companies-are-using-erlang-and-why-mytopdogstatus/
on “Why I wrote the BEAM book”Submitted Which companies are using Erlang, and why? as a story · 394 points
HN discussionThis isn't necessarily an endorsement of one protocol/ecosystem over the other, nor do I have direct experience with integrating Matrix or XMPP (though I run the latter on my home-server for family), but XMPP has seen a few large deployments, including in healthcare (in the UK)[0][1] and in Germany[2]. The consumer-facing client ecosystem for XMPP has indeed seen less rapid development than Matrix (the latter probab…
Comment linking /case-studies/pando-health-case-study/
on “Germany's national healthcare system adopts Matrix for communication”Submitted Twenty Years of Open Source Erlang: A Retrospective from the trenches as a story · 287 points
HN discussionErlang has a per-process GC - each Erlang process has it's own heap and it's own garbage collector. There's no VM-wide GC. This usually means the GC pauses apply only to a small part of your system, while the other parts are running completely normally. There's a good article that describes it in depth: https://www.erlang-solutions.com/blog/erlang-19-0-garbage-co...
Comment linking /blog/erlang-19-0-garbage-collector.html
on “Modern garbage collection”Submitted Erlang 19.0 Garbage Collector as a story · 261 points
HN discussionHi, I'm quite new to the community myself, so I don't have any established contacts to share at the moment. I recommend checking here: http://www.meetup.com/Elixir-Berlin/ This company also has an office in Berlin now: https://www.erlang-solutions.com/contact.html
Comment linking /contact.html
on “Why Erlang Matters”Submitted Let’s Talk Concurrency: Panel with Sir Tony Hoare, Joe Armstrong, Carl Hewitt as a story · 250 points
HN discussionwhy wouldn't you just use rabbit rpms that depend on the exact correct versions of erlang? aka els-erlang https://www.erlang-solutions.com/resources/download.html Linux distros have always been terrible places to find reliable packages.
Comment linking /resources/download.html
on “Which companies are using Erlang, and why?”Submitted Let's Talk Concurrency with Sir Tony Hoare as a story · 189 points
HN discussionI don't know how the Erlang GC works so I can't really comment on that If you're interested, here are a few helpful blogposts on the subject: - This is a pretty short and readable post, though it's a bit old (2008): "Garbage Collection in Erlang" [0] - A more detailed (and recent -- 2015) blogpost: "Erlang Garbage Collection Details and Why It Matters" [1]. - And this is the most up-to-date description, from April 2…
Comment linking /blog/erlang-19-0-garbage-collector.html
on “Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods (2013)”Submitted Optimising for Concurrency: Comparing the BEAM and JVM virtual machines as a story · 185 points
HN discussionHewitt argues that erlang/elixir/beam isn't the actor model because of how Erlang processes receive/process messages more here: https://www.erlang-solutions.com/blog/lets-talkconcurrency-p... and here: https://codesync.global/media/almost-actors-comparing-pony-l...
Comment linking /blog/lets-talkconcurrency-panel-discussion-with-sir-tony-hoare-joe-armstrong-and-carl-hewitt/
on “1931: Kurt Gödel shows limits of math, logic, computing, AI”Submitted Why scaling and parallelism remain hard even with new tools and languages as a story · 141 points
HN discussionBEAM based languages lack "good" debuggers, because they historically depend on tracing instead of debuggers. I recently wrote a blogpost about the tracing landscape in Elixir. https://www.erlang-solutions.com/blog/a-guide-to-tracing-in-... But the main reason is that BEAM languages are mainly used for concurrent computing which is a very difficult problem to debug with classical debuggers. I know it is not a mainst…
Comment linking /blog/a-guide-to-tracing-in-elixir.html
on “Why am I interested in Elixir?”Submitted Remembering Joe, a Quarter of a Century of Inspiration and Friendship as a story · 123 points
HN discussionCan you articulate the kinds of business problems Erlang is particularly well-suited to solve? When you choose Erlang for a project, what kind of return on investment do you think it typically offers? Does it lead to significant cost savings or help generate more revenue in ways that other languages might not? In situations where Erlang is chosen, what are some concrete examples of how it has demonstrably increased…
Comment linking /blog/which-companies-are-using-erlang-and-why-mytopdogstatus/
on “Erlang's not about lightweight processes and message passing (2023)”Submitted Why do systems fail? Tandem NonStop system and fault tolerance as a story · 119 points
HN discussionWe have the XMPP Compliance Suites 2018[0] providing an overview of protocol-level specifications that a modern client or server should implement, and there was recently a nice article[1] for some example use cases. What is still missing is everything above the wire protocol level. The XSF, being the XMPP Standards Foundation, is guarding the protocols, and things like UX and client interoperability are considered a…
Comment linking /blog/21-xmpp-use-cases-and-the-best-ways-to-achieve-them.html
on “Messenger systems compared by security, privacy, compatibility, and features”Submitted The Beam as a story · 105 points
HN discussion> Again, a lot of guessing and assumptions what could be in a perfect XMPP world, but nobody finds nowadays. The German police and British health service would say that their XMPP implementations are pretty secure implementations: - https://twitter.com/inputmice/status/1203611711967813633 - https://hellopando.com/ / https://www.erlang-solutions.com/case-studies/pando-health-c...
Comment linking /case-studies/pando-health-case-study/
on “XMPP: The secure communication protocol that respects privacy”Submitted Supporting the BEAM community with free CI/CD security audits as a story · 93 points
HN discussionHrm, unless I am missing something, Phoenix requires Elixir 1.0.2 which is available in Erlang Solutions sources? https://www.erlang-solutions.com/downloads/download-elixir The reason though is that Elixir 1.0.2 includes some bug fixes that affects Phoenix in development.
Comment linking /downloads/download-elixir
on “Phoenix – Elixir Web Framework”Submitted Debugging an Erlang system by connecting to the Erlang VM with gdb as a story · 93 points
HN discussion> If languages like Haskell and Erlang gave a competitive advantage, wouldn't we see companies which used them succeeding over those that don't? Like these? https://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell_in_industry https://www.erlang-solutions.com/industries https://ocaml.org/learn/companies.html http://fsharp.org/testimonials/
Comment linking /industries
on “Half a decade with Go”Submitted Erlang Garbage Collector as a story · 87 points
HN discussionnot exactly, but you can have a look at how GC works in BEAM[1][2]. [1]: https://www.erlang-solutions.com/blog/erlang-19-0-garbage-co... [2]: https://hamidreza-s.github.io/erlang%20garbage%20collection%...
Comment linking /blog/erlang-19-0-garbage-collector.html
on “Dismissing Python Garbage Collection at Instagram”Submitted Languages for online betting: an investigation of Go, Erlang, and Elixir as a story · 79 points
HN discussion
