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Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Gambit / Termite / Erlang

Dominique Boucher compares Erlang with Gambit Scheme, and in particular Termite, which is an Erlang-like system the runs on Gambit. His conclusion...

I would choose Erlang over Gambit-C+Termite for the development of a new scalable and robust distributed application. That being said, Gambit-C is a nice piece of software (in fact my preferred Scheme system), it has a great debugger, and the Scheme Now! project will certainly lead to a number of good portable libraries for Scheme. But from the perspective of an industrial developer, Erlang wins easily.
I would have to go along with this conclusion for almost any system that might have to be "production-ready" in the next couple two, three years. On the other hand I think Gambit Scheme is the better investment for the long haul. Erlang is a great language, and OTP is a solid framework for distributed systems. But Scheme is the better "foundation" language and Gambit has all the qualities of Erlang to become a solid foundation for all kinds of distributed systems, even an Erlang system, as exhibited by ETOS (Erlang-to-Scheme).

2 comments:

Philip Robinson said...

So why not use Erlang now, then ETOS in X years to convert all your code? :-)

Barry Cswords said...

I hope the Gambit/Termite runtime can be turn as a module of JVM, but not written in java like Clojure. And then it would be even better than Ruby.

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Portland, Oregon, United States
I'm usually writing from my favorite location on the planet, the pacific northwest of the u.s. I write for myself only and unless otherwise specified my posts here should not be taken as representing an official position of my employer. Contact me at my gee mail account, username patrickdlogan.