What is the difference between multicore programming in Erlang and other language?

Question

I read Joe Armstrong\'s \'Programming Erlang\', and the \'n times faster in n core machine\' theory. The efficient way to multicore programming in Erlang is to use lots of proce

Answer 1

Gordon Guthrie's answer is great. Where is bigger difference is personal preference. From my point of view bigger difference in Erlang is reliability and serendipitous scalability. In Erlang you can design concurrent processes in natural manner without big performance issues and this will be serendipity scalable a distributable. There are pitfalls in big messages and so but in most cases your design will be elegant and performs well without especial care. When your design is elegant you make less mistakes, it will be better manageable and incidentally you can distribute and scale with minimal effort and result will be reliable.

To be brief, in Erlang you can design your program differently than in C++ because you can do it without big performance issue and promises good scalability and reliability without big effort. Nobody's perfect but for interestingly big amount of tasks Erlang is best choice.

Edit: Nice presentation about difference between Erlang and C++ - Erlang 2.5x bigger top performance, 3x less latency and 18x less SLOC - I assume that Motorola's developers are experienced in C++ enough to write good software.