Alternatives to Erlang logo

Alternatives to Erlang

Elixir, Haskell, Golang, Clojure, and Akka are the most popular alternatives and competitors to Erlang.
1.3K
737
+ 1
327

What is Erlang and what are its top alternatives?

Some of Erlang's uses are in telecoms, banking, e-commerce, computer telephony and instant messaging. Erlang's runtime system has built-in support for concurrency, distribution and fault tolerance. OTP is set of Erlang libraries and design principles providing middle-ware to develop these systems.
Erlang is a tool in the Languages category of a tech stack.
Erlang is an open source tool with 10.9K GitHub stars and 2.9K GitHub forks. Here’s a link to Erlang's open source repository on GitHub

Top Alternatives to Erlang

  • Elixir
    Elixir

    Elixir leverages the Erlang VM, known for running low-latency, distributed and fault-tolerant systems, while also being successfully used in web development and the embedded software domain. ...

  • Haskell
    Haskell

    It is a general purpose language that can be used in any domain and use case, it is ideally suited for proprietary business logic and data analysis, fast prototyping and enhancing existing software environments with correct code, performance and scalability. ...

  • Golang
    Golang

    Go is expressive, concise, clean, and efficient. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel type system enables flexible and modular program construction. Go compiles quickly to machine code yet has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. It's a fast, statically typed, compiled language that feels like a dynamically typed, interpreted language. ...

  • Clojure
    Clojure

    Clojure is designed to be a general-purpose language, combining the approachability and interactive development of a scripting language with an efficient and robust infrastructure for multithreaded programming. Clojure is a compiled language - it compiles directly to JVM bytecode, yet remains completely dynamic. Clojure is a dialect of Lisp, and shares with Lisp the code-as-data philosophy and a powerful macro system. ...

  • Akka
    Akka

    Akka is a toolkit and runtime for building highly concurrent, distributed, and resilient message-driven applications on the JVM. ...

  • OCaml
    OCaml

    It is an industrial strength programming language supporting functional, imperative and object-oriented styles. It is the technology of choice in companies where a single mistake can cost millions and speed matters, ...

  • Rust
    Rust

    Rust is a systems programming language that combines strong compile-time correctness guarantees with fast performance. It improves upon the ideas of other systems languages like C++ by providing guaranteed memory safety (no crashes, no data races) and complete control over the lifecycle of memory. ...

  • Java
    Java

    Java is a programming language and computing platform first released by Sun Microsystems in 1995. There are lots of applications and websites that will not work unless you have Java installed, and more are created every day. Java is fast, secure, and reliable. From laptops to datacenters, game consoles to scientific supercomputers, cell phones to the Internet, Java is everywhere! ...

Erlang alternatives & related posts

Elixir logo

Elixir

3.4K
3.2K
1.3K
Dynamic, functional language designed for building scalable and maintainable applications
3.4K
3.2K
+ 1
1.3K
PROS OF ELIXIR
  • 172
    Concurrency
  • 161
    Functional
  • 133
    Erlang vm
  • 112
    Great documentation
  • 105
    Great tooling
  • 86
    Immutable data structures
  • 81
    Open source
  • 77
    Pattern-matching
  • 62
    Easy to get started
  • 59
    Actor library
  • 32
    Functional with a neat syntax
  • 29
    Ruby inspired
  • 25
    Erlang evolved
  • 24
    Homoiconic
  • 22
    Beauty of Ruby, Speed of Erlang/C
  • 17
    Fault Tolerant
  • 14
    Simple
  • 13
    High Performance
  • 11
    Pipe Operator
  • 11
    Good lang
  • 11
    Doc as first class citizen
  • 9
    Stinkin' fast, no memory leaks, easy on the eyes
  • 9
    Fun to write
  • 8
    Resilient to failure
  • 8
    OTP
  • 6
    GenServer takes the guesswork out of background work
  • 4
    Not Swift
  • 4
    Pattern matching
  • 4
    Idempotence
  • 4
    Fast, Concurrent with clean error messages
  • 3
    Easy to use
  • 2
    Dynamic Typing
  • 2
    Error isolation
CONS OF ELIXIR
  • 11
    Fewer jobs for Elixir experts
  • 7
    Smaller userbase than other mainstream languages
  • 5
    Elixir's dot notation less readable ("object": 1st arg)
  • 4
    Dynamic typing
  • 1
    Difficult to understand
  • 1
    Not a lot of learning books available

related Elixir posts

Kamil Kowalski
Lead Architect at Fresha · | 28 upvotes · 3.8M views

When you think about test automation, it’s crucial to make it everyone’s responsibility (not just QA Engineers'). We started with Selenium and Java, but with our platform revolving around Ruby, Elixir and JavaScript, QA Engineers were left alone to automate tests. Cypress was the answer, as we could switch to JS and simply involve more people from day one. There's a downside too, as it meant testing on Chrome only, but that was "good enough" for us + if really needed we can always cover some specific cases in a different way.

See more
Sebastian Gębski

Another major decision was to adopt Elixir and Phoenix Framework - the DX (Developer eXperience) is pretty similar to what we know from RoR, but this tech is running on the top of rock-solid Erlang platform which is powering planet-scale telecom solutions for 20+ years. So we're getting pretty much the best from both worlds: minimum friction & smart conventions that eliminate the excessive boilerplate AND highly concurrent EVM (Erlang's Virtual Machine) that makes all the scalability problems vanish. The transition was very smooth - none of Ruby developers we had decided to leave because of Elixir. What is more, we kept recruiting Ruby developers w/o any requirement regarding Elixir proficiency & we still were able to educate them internally in almost no time. Obviously Elixir comes with some more tools in the stack: Credo , Hex , AppSignal (required to properly monitor BEAM apps).

See more
Haskell logo

Haskell

1.4K
1.2K
527
An advanced purely-functional programming language
1.4K
1.2K
+ 1
527
PROS OF HASKELL
  • 90
    Purely-functional programming
  • 66
    Statically typed
  • 59
    Type-safe
  • 39
    Open source
  • 38
    Great community
  • 31
    Built-in concurrency
  • 30
    Built-in parallelism
  • 30
    Composable
  • 24
    Referentially transparent
  • 20
    Generics
  • 15
    Type inference
  • 15
    Intellectual satisfaction
  • 12
    If it compiles, it's correct
  • 8
    Flexible
  • 8
    Monads
  • 5
    Great type system
  • 4
    Proposition testing with QuickCheck
  • 4
    One of the most powerful languages *(see blub paradox)*
  • 4
    Purely-functional Programming
  • 3
    Highly expressive, type-safe, fast development time
  • 3
    Pattern matching and completeness checking
  • 3
    Great maintainability of the code
  • 3
    Fun
  • 3
    Reliable
  • 2
    Best in class thinking tool
  • 2
    Kind system
  • 2
    Better type-safe than sorry
  • 2
    Type classes
  • 1
    Predictable
  • 1
    Orthogonality
CONS OF HASKELL
  • 9
    Too much distraction in language extensions
  • 8
    Error messages can be very confusing
  • 5
    Libraries have poor documentation
  • 3
    No good ABI
  • 3
    No best practices
  • 2
    Poor packaging for apps written in it for Linux distros
  • 2
    Sometimes performance is unpredictable
  • 1
    Slow compilation
  • 1
    Monads are hard to understand

related Haskell posts

Shared insights
on
HaskellHaskellScalaScala

Why I am using Haskell in my free time?

I have 3 reasons for it. I am looking for:

Fun.

Improve functional programming skill.

Improve problem-solving skill.

Laziness and mathematical abstractions behind Haskell makes it a wonderful language.

It is Pure functional, it helps me to write better Scala code.

Highly expressive language gives elegant ways to solve coding puzzle.

See more
Golang logo

Golang

21.9K
13.6K
3.3K
An open source programming language that makes it easy to build simple, reliable, and efficient software
21.9K
13.6K
+ 1
3.3K
PROS OF GOLANG
  • 547
    High-performance
  • 395
    Simple, minimal syntax
  • 363
    Fun to write
  • 301
    Easy concurrency support via goroutines
  • 273
    Fast compilation times
  • 193
    Goroutines
  • 180
    Statically linked binaries that are simple to deploy
  • 150
    Simple compile build/run procedures
  • 136
    Backed by google
  • 136
    Great community
  • 53
    Garbage collection built-in
  • 45
    Built-in Testing
  • 44
    Excellent tools - gofmt, godoc etc
  • 39
    Elegant and concise like Python, fast like C
  • 37
    Awesome to Develop
  • 26
    Used for Docker
  • 25
    Flexible interface system
  • 24
    Deploy as executable
  • 24
    Great concurrency pattern
  • 20
    Open-source Integration
  • 18
    Easy to read
  • 17
    Fun to write and so many feature out of the box
  • 16
    Go is God
  • 14
    Easy to deploy
  • 14
    Powerful and simple
  • 14
    Its Simple and Heavy duty
  • 13
    Best language for concurrency
  • 13
    Concurrency
  • 11
    Rich standard library
  • 11
    Safe GOTOs
  • 10
    Clean code, high performance
  • 10
    Easy setup
  • 9
    High performance
  • 9
    Simplicity, Concurrency, Performance
  • 8
    Hassle free deployment
  • 8
    Single binary avoids library dependency issues
  • 7
    Gofmt
  • 7
    Cross compiling
  • 7
    Simple, powerful, and great performance
  • 7
    Used by Giants of the industry
  • 6
    Garbage Collection
  • 5
    Very sophisticated syntax
  • 5
    Excellent tooling
  • 5
    WYSIWYG
  • 4
    Keep it simple and stupid
  • 4
    Widely used
  • 4
    Kubernetes written on Go
  • 2
    No generics
  • 1
    Operator goto
  • 1
    Looks not fancy, but promoting pragmatic idioms
CONS OF GOLANG
  • 42
    You waste time in plumbing code catching errors
  • 25
    Verbose
  • 23
    Packages and their path dependencies are braindead
  • 16
    Google's documentations aren't beginer friendly
  • 15
    Dependency management when working on multiple projects
  • 10
    Automatic garbage collection overheads
  • 8
    Uncommon syntax
  • 7
    Type system is lacking (no generics, etc)
  • 5
    Collection framework is lacking (list, set, map)
  • 3
    Best programming language
  • 1
    A failed experiment to combine c and python

related Golang posts

Conor Myhrvold
Tech Brand Mgr, Office of CTO at Uber · | 44 upvotes · 9.5M views

How Uber developed the open source, end-to-end distributed tracing Jaeger , now a CNCF project:

Distributed tracing is quickly becoming a must-have component in the tools that organizations use to monitor their complex, microservice-based architectures. At Uber, our open source distributed tracing system Jaeger saw large-scale internal adoption throughout 2016, integrated into hundreds of microservices and now recording thousands of traces every second.

Here is the story of how we got here, from investigating off-the-shelf solutions like Zipkin, to why we switched from pull to push architecture, and how distributed tracing will continue to evolve:

https://eng.uber.com/distributed-tracing/

(GitHub Pages : https://www.jaegertracing.io/, GitHub: https://github.com/jaegertracing/jaeger)

Bindings/Operator: Python Java Node.js Go C++ Kubernetes JavaScript OpenShift C# Apache Spark

See more
Nick Parsons
Building cool things on the internet 🛠️ at Stream · | 35 upvotes · 3.2M views

Winds 2.0 is an open source Podcast/RSS reader developed by Stream with a core goal to enable a wide range of developers to contribute.

We chose JavaScript because nearly every developer knows or can, at the very least, read JavaScript. With ES6 and Node.js v10.x.x, it’s become a very capable language. Async/Await is powerful and easy to use (Async/Await vs Promises). Babel allows us to experiment with next-generation JavaScript (features that are not in the official JavaScript spec yet). Yarn allows us to consistently install packages quickly (and is filled with tons of new tricks)

We’re using JavaScript for everything – both front and backend. Most of our team is experienced with Go and Python, so Node was not an obvious choice for this app.

Sure... there will be haters who refuse to acknowledge that there is anything remotely positive about JavaScript (there are even rants on Hacker News about Node.js); however, without writing completely in JavaScript, we would not have seen the results we did.

#FrameworksFullStack #Languages

See more
Clojure logo

Clojure

1.8K
1.4K
1.1K
A dynamic programming language that targets the Java Virtual Machine
1.8K
1.4K
+ 1
1.1K
PROS OF CLOJURE
  • 117
    It is a lisp
  • 100
    Persistent data structures
  • 100
    Concise syntax
  • 90
    jvm-based language
  • 89
    Concurrency
  • 81
    Interactive repl
  • 76
    Code is data
  • 61
    Open source
  • 61
    Lazy data structures
  • 57
    Macros
  • 49
    Functional
  • 23
    Simplistic
  • 22
    Immutable by default
  • 20
    Excellent collections
  • 19
    Fast-growing community
  • 15
    Multiple host languages
  • 15
    Simple (not easy!)
  • 15
    Practical Lisp
  • 10
    Because it's really fun to use
  • 10
    Addictive
  • 9
    Community
  • 9
    Web friendly
  • 9
    Rapid development
  • 9
    It creates Reusable code
  • 8
    Minimalist
  • 6
    Programmable programming language
  • 6
    Java interop
  • 5
    Regained interest in programming
  • 4
    Compiles to JavaScript
  • 3
    Share a lot of code with clojurescript/use on frontend
  • 3
    EDN
  • 1
    Clojurescript
CONS OF CLOJURE
  • 11
    Cryptic stacktraces
  • 5
    Need to wrap basically every java lib
  • 4
    Toxic community
  • 3
    Good code heavily relies on local conventions
  • 3
    Tonns of abandonware
  • 3
    Slow application startup
  • 1
    Usable only with REPL
  • 1
    Hiring issues
  • 1
    It's a lisp
  • 1
    Bad documented libs
  • 1
    Macros are overused by devs
  • 1
    Tricky profiling
  • 1
    IDE with high learning curve
  • 1
    Configuration bolierplate
  • 1
    Conservative community
  • 0
    Have no good and fast fmt

related Clojure posts

Stitch is run entirely on AWS. All of our transactional databases are run with Amazon RDS, and we rely on Amazon S3 for data persistence in various stages of our pipeline. Our product integrates with Amazon Redshift as a data destination, and we also use Redshift as an internal data warehouse (powered by Stitch, of course).

The majority of our services run on stateless Amazon EC2 instances that are managed by AWS OpsWorks. We recently introduced Kubernetes into our infrastructure to run the scheduled jobs that execute Singer code to extract data from various sources. Although we tend to be wary of shiny new toys, Kubernetes has proven to be a good fit for this problem, and its stability, strong community and helpful tooling have made it easy for us to incorporate into our operations.

While we continue to be happy with Clojure for our internal services, we felt that its relatively narrow adoption could impede Singer's growth. We chose Python both because it is well suited to the task, and it seems to have reached critical mass among data engineers. All that being said, the Singer spec is language agnostic, and integrations and libraries have been developed in JavaScript, Go, and Clojure.

See more

I adopted Clojure and ClojureScript because:

  • it's 1 language, multiple platforms.
  • Simple syntax.
  • Designed to avoid unwanted side effects and bugs.
  • Immutable data-structures.
  • Compact code, very expressive.
  • Source code is data.
  • It has super-flexible macro.
  • Has metadata.
  • Interoperability with JavaScript, Java and C#.
See more
Akka logo

Akka

1.1K
1K
88
Build powerful concurrent & distributed applications more easily
1.1K
1K
+ 1
88
PROS OF AKKA
  • 32
    Great concurrency model
  • 17
    Fast
  • 12
    Actor Library
  • 10
    Open source
  • 7
    Resilient
  • 5
    Message driven
  • 5
    Scalable
CONS OF AKKA
  • 3
    Mixing futures with Akka tell is difficult
  • 2
    Closing of futures
  • 2
    No type safety
  • 1
    Very difficult to refactor
  • 1
    Typed actors still not stable

related Akka posts

To solve the problem of scheduling and executing arbitrary tasks in its distributed infrastructure, PagerDuty created an open-source tool called Scheduler. Scheduler is written in Scala and uses Cassandra for task persistence. It also adds Apache Kafka to handle task queuing and partitioning, with Akka to structure the library’s concurrency.

The service’s logic schedules a task by passing it to the Scheduler’s Scala API, which serializes the task metadata and enqueues it into Kafka. Scheduler then consumes the tasks, and posts them to Cassandra to prevent data loss.

See more
Shared insights
on
AkkaAkkaKafkaKafka

I decided to use Akka instead of Kafka streams because I have personal relationships at @Lightbend.

See more
OCaml logo

OCaml

298
170
28
A general purpose industrial-strength programming language
298
170
+ 1
28
PROS OF OCAML
  • 7
    Satisfying to write
  • 6
    Pattern matching
  • 4
    Also has OOP
  • 4
    Very practical
  • 3
    Easy syntax
  • 3
    Extremely powerful type inference
  • 1
    Efficient compiler
CONS OF OCAML
  • 3
    Small community
  • 1
    Royal pain in the neck to compile large programs

related OCaml posts

Rust logo

Rust

5.5K
4.7K
1.2K
A safe, concurrent, practical language
5.5K
4.7K
+ 1
1.2K
PROS OF RUST
  • 143
    Guaranteed memory safety
  • 130
    Fast
  • 87
    Open source
  • 75
    Minimal runtime
  • 70
    Pattern matching
  • 63
    Type inference
  • 56
    Algebraic data types
  • 56
    Concurrent
  • 46
    Efficient C bindings
  • 43
    Practical
  • 37
    Best advances in languages in 20 years
  • 32
    Safe, fast, easy + friendly community
  • 30
    Fix for C/C++
  • 25
    Stablity
  • 24
    Zero-cost abstractions
  • 23
    Closures
  • 20
    Great community
  • 20
    Extensive compiler checks
  • 18
    No NULL type
  • 18
    Async/await
  • 15
    Completely cross platform: Windows, Linux, Android
  • 15
    No Garbage Collection
  • 14
    Great documentations
  • 14
    High-performance
  • 12
    Super fast
  • 12
    Generics
  • 12
    High performance
  • 11
    Safety no runtime crashes
  • 11
    Guaranteed thread data race safety
  • 11
    Fearless concurrency
  • 11
    Macros
  • 10
    Compiler can generate Webassembly
  • 10
    Helpful compiler
  • 9
    Easy Deployment
  • 9
    RLS provides great IDE support
  • 9
    Prevents data races
  • 8
    Real multithreading
  • 8
    Painless dependency management
  • 7
    Good package management
  • 5
    Support on Other Languages
CONS OF RUST
  • 26
    Hard to learn
  • 23
    Ownership learning curve
  • 11
    Unfriendly, verbose syntax
  • 4
    Variable shadowing
  • 4
    High size of builded executable
  • 4
    Many type operations make it difficult to follow
  • 3
    No jobs
  • 1
    Use it only for timeoass not in production

related Rust posts

Caue Carvalho
Shared insights
on
RustRustGolangGolangPythonPythonRubyRubyC#C#

Hello!

I'm a developer for over 9 years, and most of this time I've been working with C# and it is paying my bills until nowadays. But I'm seeking to learn other languages and expand the possibilities for the next years.

Now the question... I know Ruby is far from dead but is it still worth investing time in learning it? Or would be better to take Python, Golang, or even Rust? Or maybe another language.

Thanks in advance.

See more
James Cunningham
Operations Engineer at Sentry · | 18 upvotes · 313.4K views
Shared insights
on
PythonPythonRustRust
at

Sentry's event processing pipeline, which is responsible for handling all of the ingested event data that makes it through to our offline task processing, is written primarily in Python.

For particularly intense code paths, like our source map processing pipeline, we have begun re-writing those bits in Rust. Rust’s lack of garbage collection makes it a particularly convenient language for embedding in Python. It allows us to easily build a Python extension where all memory is managed from the Python side (if the Python wrapper gets collected by the Python GC we clean up the Rust object as well).

See more
Java logo

Java

131.3K
99.3K
3.7K
A concurrent, class-based, object-oriented, language specifically designed to have as few implementation dependencies as possible
131.3K
99.3K
+ 1
3.7K
PROS OF JAVA
  • 599
    Great libraries
  • 445
    Widely used
  • 400
    Excellent tooling
  • 395
    Huge amount of documentation available
  • 334
    Large pool of developers available
  • 208
    Open source
  • 202
    Excellent performance
  • 157
    Great development
  • 150
    Used for android
  • 148
    Vast array of 3rd party libraries
  • 60
    Compiled Language
  • 52
    Used for Web
  • 46
    High Performance
  • 46
    Managed memory
  • 44
    Native threads
  • 43
    Statically typed
  • 35
    Easy to read
  • 33
    Great Community
  • 29
    Reliable platform
  • 24
    Sturdy garbage collection
  • 24
    JVM compatibility
  • 22
    Cross Platform Enterprise Integration
  • 20
    Universal platform
  • 20
    Good amount of APIs
  • 18
    Great Support
  • 14
    Great ecosystem
  • 11
    Backward compatible
  • 11
    Lots of boilerplate
  • 10
    Everywhere
  • 9
    Excellent SDK - JDK
  • 7
    It's Java
  • 7
    Cross-platform
  • 7
    Static typing
  • 6
    Mature language thus stable systems
  • 6
    Better than Ruby
  • 6
    Long term language
  • 6
    Portability
  • 5
    Clojure
  • 5
    Vast Collections Library
  • 5
    Used for Android development
  • 4
    Most developers favorite
  • 4
    Old tech
  • 3
    History
  • 3
    Great Structure
  • 3
    Stable platform, which many new languages depend on
  • 3
    Javadoc
  • 3
    Testable
  • 3
    Best martial for design
  • 2
    Type Safe
  • 2
    Faster than python
  • 0
    Job
CONS OF JAVA
  • 33
    Verbosity
  • 27
    NullpointerException
  • 17
    Nightmare to Write
  • 16
    Overcomplexity is praised in community culture
  • 12
    Boiler plate code
  • 8
    Classpath hell prior to Java 9
  • 6
    No REPL
  • 4
    No property
  • 3
    Code are too long
  • 2
    Non-intuitive generic implementation
  • 2
    There is not optional parameter
  • 2
    Floating-point errors
  • 1
    Java's too statically, stronglly, and strictly typed
  • 1
    Returning Wildcard Types
  • 1
    Terrbible compared to Python/Batch Perormence

related Java posts

Conor Myhrvold
Tech Brand Mgr, Office of CTO at Uber · | 44 upvotes · 9.5M views

How Uber developed the open source, end-to-end distributed tracing Jaeger , now a CNCF project:

Distributed tracing is quickly becoming a must-have component in the tools that organizations use to monitor their complex, microservice-based architectures. At Uber, our open source distributed tracing system Jaeger saw large-scale internal adoption throughout 2016, integrated into hundreds of microservices and now recording thousands of traces every second.

Here is the story of how we got here, from investigating off-the-shelf solutions like Zipkin, to why we switched from pull to push architecture, and how distributed tracing will continue to evolve:

https://eng.uber.com/distributed-tracing/

(GitHub Pages : https://www.jaegertracing.io/, GitHub: https://github.com/jaegertracing/jaeger)

Bindings/Operator: Python Java Node.js Go C++ Kubernetes JavaScript OpenShift C# Apache Spark

See more
Kamil Kowalski
Lead Architect at Fresha · | 28 upvotes · 3.8M views

When you think about test automation, it’s crucial to make it everyone’s responsibility (not just QA Engineers'). We started with Selenium and Java, but with our platform revolving around Ruby, Elixir and JavaScript, QA Engineers were left alone to automate tests. Cypress was the answer, as we could switch to JS and simply involve more people from day one. There's a downside too, as it meant testing on Chrome only, but that was "good enough" for us + if really needed we can always cover some specific cases in a different way.

See more