[Info-vax] VMS and Erlang cultures

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 21-02-2011 00:44, Wendell wrote:
> Recent discussion here has pointed out the strength of OpenVMS in the
> telecom industry. This brought to mind the Erlang language, which was
> designed for telecom servers and is considered by many to be the best
> language for that job.
>
> I googled around for discussion of Erlang on VMS and was surprised to
> find not a single reference. There is a recent port of Erlang to
> OpenVMS IA-64, but I couldn't find any discussion of its being used.
>
> https://sites.google.com/a/johndapps.com/www/erlangonopenvms
>
> So we have two products that are especially strong in the telecom
> industry yet have practically no overlap in use. Are two distinct
> development cultures? My impression of the design philosophies is that
> VMS emphasizes "fault resistance" while Erlang's focus is "fault
> tolerance" or better, "fault recovery".

Erlang is for massive concurrent soft real time systems.

It is still used in telecom: Ericsson, Nortel, T-Mobile, Telia,
CellPoint.

But it is also used by others in need for massive concurrency
and some real time capabilities: MMORPG's, FaceBook chat (!).

Some of these systems (telecom) are embedded, which are not really
an area where VMS has been present at all, but other are
regular servers that could in principle run VMS - they just
don't for the same reasons that many other systems does not
run VMS.

I would expect VMS presence in telecom to be focused
around: RDB, Oracle, ACMS, Cobol etc.. BOA stuff.

Different usage, different people, different designs.

Arne