ERLANG – CONCURRENT PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE

Abstract

Erlang is a concurrent programming language designed for programming fault- tolerant distributed systems at Ericsson and has been, since 2000, freely available subject to an open-source license. More recently, we’ve seen renewed interest in Erlang, as the Erlang way of programming maps naturally to multi-core computers. In it the notion of a process is fundamental, with processes created and managed by the Erlang runtime system, not by the underlying operating system. The individual processes, which are programmed in a simple dynamically typed functional programming language, do not share memory and exchange data through message passing, simplifying the programming of multi-core computers. Its native support for distribution and fault recovery makes it a very powerful language, since the paradigm can scale from the multiple cores of a CPU to a large network-centric system.