Good language to develop a game server in?

Question

I was just wondering what language would be a good choice for developing a game server to support a large (thousands) number of users? I dabbled in python, but realized that it

Answer 1

The obvious candidates are Java and Erlang:

Pro Java:

• ease of development
• good development environments
• stability, good stack traces
• well-known (easy to find experienced programmers, lots of libraries, books, ...)
• quite fast, mature VM

Pro Erlang:

• proven in systems that need >99.9% uptime
• ability to have software updates without downtime
• scalable (not only multi-core, but also multi-machine)

Contra Erlang:

• unfamiliar syntax and programming paradigm
• not so well known; hard to get experienced programmers for
• VM is not nearly as fast as java

If your game server mainly works as a event dispatcher (with a bit of a database tucked on), Erlang's message-driven paradigm should be a good match.

In this day and age, I would not consider using an unmanaged language (like C or C++); the marginal performance benefits simply aren't worth the hassle.