Lisp in erlang or erlang in lisp?

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Justis

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Mar 22, 2014, 7:38:00 AM3/22/14
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Hi,

I have asked a question on stackoverflow, but it seems that they put my question on hold because it might be opionion based rather than facts based.

Putting my question in here so you wouldn't need to open that link.

googling around I found that Lisp SBCL is faster than Erlang HiPE (source), though I read that Erlang is way more memory efficient with lots of multiple processes. So, would lisp (for example joxa, though it's DSL, so maybe it's a stupid question..) on Erlang VM would be faster than erlang itself, or it's smarter in performance point of view to have Erlang features in/on Lisp?

I am asking because I'd like to try/learn to make a web application and or website with a purpose for high usage (for example facebook & whatsapp used Erlang to deal with high usages) on relatively as low hardware as possible (OT: I simply dislike bloat - in example when hardware gets faster and faster but software developers often don't optimize things because hardware is getting faster and then you don't notice the technological progress because as it was lagging 10 years ago it is still lagging now on 100 or 1000 times faster hardware. This of course doesn't apply to everything), but without scarifying the features or modern/popular thins of today (like the guys from suckless sometimes do).

I found that on Erlang side things are a bit more progressive and more evolved than on Lisp side, for example things like Chicago Boss looks promising and attractive. And as they state that you could run things or relatively low hardware, but how it would be with some server-side code execution time, when you need to compute something for the user and you want to do that as fast as possible, so he [user] would feel comfortable with your website or application. So looking at first link - some benchmarks it seems that it would be better to use Lisp, because its faster compared to Erlang HiPE, but on the other hand you want that features of Erlang VM which allows of easy resource sharing and scales to a lot when running, for example 10 000 instances of the same web application..

Any thoughts on this?

Sincerely,
Justinas Petravičius

A student from Lithuania :)
 

- Ad Noctum -

David Welton

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Mar 22, 2014, 3:37:55 PM3/22/14
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Your question is probably more appropriate for the Erlang mailing
list, but picking a language means keeping many, many things in mind:

* How important is it to write things quickly? ASM is fast, but it
takes a long time to crank something out, and then good luck modifying
it.
* How important is efficiency in the language?
* How important is it to find people skilled in the language?
* How many libraries and books and tools and 'other stuff' exist for
the language?
* Are there particular aspects of the language that you really need?
Fault tollerance, for instance, is a strong spot for Erlang. Some
people really need that, others don't.
* What do I already know that I can be productive in quickly?
* Am I worried about language hipsters criticizing me for my choice in
the future? (Avoid PHP in this case:-)

Mostly it boils down to "what are you trying to do?"

--
David N. Welton

http://www.welton.it/davidw/

http://www.dedasys.com/

Duncan McGreggor

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Mar 22, 2014, 4:13:13 PM3/22/14
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Hey Justinas,

If you like Lisps and Erlang, you might want to check out LFE in addition to Joxa. Depending upon what you're doing, I've found Lisp hacking in Erlang to be an extremely rewarding experience.

I continue to watch ChicagoBoss development, but I've been doing more of my recent work directly on top of YAWS. The simplicity of writing a single entry point and not having to think around a framework (I've been in framework land since the 90s... it's nice to get away, once in a while!) has made it a compelling tool in the larger Erlang dev box.

If you're interested, you may want to check out some simple examples:
 * https://github.com/lfe/yaws-rest-starter
 * https://github.com/oubiwann/cloudy/blob/master/src/cloudy.lfe#L64
 * https://github.com/lfe/lfetool/#new-yaws

The first two are REST examples, and the last one shows how to use lfetool to generate a new sample web project that uses Bootstrap (even the HTML is S-expressions). If you want to try it out, it should be this simple:
$ curl -o ./lfetool https://raw.github.com/lfe/lfetool/master/lfetool
$ bash lfetool install /usr/local/bin
$ lfetool new yaws bootstrap my-web-project
$ cd my-web-project
$ make dev
And then point your web browser at http://localhost:5099/.

Sorry for the hijack, Bossers :-/

d



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