Comment by Nextgrid 3 days ago
> The BEAM ecosystem (Erlang, Elixir, Gleam, etc) can do distributed microservices within a monolith.
This ain't new. Any language supporting loading modules can give you the organization benefit of microservices (if you consider it a benefit that is - very few orgs actually benefit from the separation) while operating like a monolith. Java could do it 20+ years ago, just upload your .WAR files to an application server.
Erlang seems like a joy to use. I feel a slight pang of regret that I haven't (yet) gotten to use it in my career. (I don't quite have the time or energy to play with it during my off hours, but it is on my list for someday.)
You might give Gleam [0] a try, which is advertised as "language you can learn in a day". It is type-safe, supports the BEAM and you can easily invoke Erlang and Elixir. Compiles to Erlang or Javascript.
This looks delightful! Thanks for the recommendation!
This is kind of why I've never bothered to look at it - everyone /says/ it's a wonderful thing, but... nobody uses it in production, or hobbies (apart from the diehard fans)
It might see the light of day at some point in the future, but if the past is anything to go by...
What BEAM offers isn’t modularity, but concurrency. Every genserver is operating concurrently, all within the runtime. Up until actor models came to Java, and more recent Java with lightweight threads, Java was incapable of this. Java is still missing things that BEAM and OTP provides.
Besides: Erlang predates Java.
I mean sure but one could also argue that VB6 can do the same analogue of Java so long as ASP is involved... And yes I've seen it done; you have a basic interface similar to an actor, but really more like a 'Take a key-value in for input, do processing on it, return a key-value to go to the next stage' and then the other necessary glue to handle that. The way the glue worked, it was minimal ceremony to get a new module in.
NGL It was clever enough that every few years I think about trying to redo the concept in another language....
> Java could do it 20+ years ago, just upload your .WAR files to an application server.
Erlang could do it almost 40 years ago.
It can be used to upgrade applications at runtime without stopping the service. That works well in Erlang, it’s designed from the ground up for it. I know of a few places that used that feature.