Decline and fall of scripting languages ?

[Bengt Richter]

On 08 Aug 2005 20:37:01 -0700, Paul Rubin <http://phr.cx@NOSPAM.invalid> wrote:
[...]
>Right now I'm mainly interested in OCaml, Haskell, Erlang, and maybe
>Occam.  Haskell seems to have the happiest users, which is always a
>good thing.  Erlang has been used for real-world systems and has
>built-in concurrency support.  OCaml seems to crush Haskell and Erlang
>(and even Java) in performance.  Occam isn't used for much practical
>any more, but takes a purist approach to concurrency that seems worth
>studying.
IIRC, I've seen something about a web server implemented in erlang
with tremendous performance at high levels of concurrency where other
implementations bog down. So I would want further details before I
believe that all OCaml versions "crush" all Erlang versions in performance.


>
>The idea is to use one of those languages for a personal project after
>my current work project wraps up pretty soon.  This would be both a
>learning effort and an attempt to write something useful.  I'm
>thinking of a web application like a discussion board or wiki,
>intended to outperform the existing ones, i.e. able to handle a
>Slashdot or Wikipedia sized load (millions of hits/day) on a single
>fast PC instead of a rack full.  "Single fast PC" will probably soon
>come to mean a two-cpu-chip motherboard in a 1U rack box, where each
>cpu chip is a dual core P4 or Athlon, so the application should be
>able to take advantage of at least 4-way multiprocessing, thus the
>interest in concurrency.
I'd suggest finding that Erlang web server writeup.

Hm, some googling ...
I think this is the graph I saw:

    http://www.sics.se/~joe/apachevsyaws.html

Can't vouch for what it means, but taken at face value
would seem to warrant a further look into details.

This turned up also

    http://eddie.sourceforge.net/txt/WP_1.0.html

which I hadn't seen before, and which looks interesting
though maybe stale?


I guess this is a home for erlang:
    http://www.erlang.se/

Much other stuff, but you know how to google ;-)

Regards,
Bengt Richter