WhatsApp achieves billions of daily messages using Erlang’s lightweight, actor‑model mailboxes instead of Kafka, delivering microsecond latency, simplicity, hardware efficiency, and reliability through a massive cluster of isolated processes.
This roundup highlights ten compelling tech stories—from falling in love with Erlang's fault‑tolerant concurrency and uncovering a historic Unix v4 tape, to warnings about "vibe coding" on RISC‑V, lazygit's Git UI boost, privacy concerns over Flock Safety cameras, Buffett's final shareholder letter, the legacy of Toy Story, SoftBank's Nvidia exit, Apple's iPhone Pocket, and FFmpeg's plea for funding—offering insights for developers and enthusiasts alike.
This article walks through a real MMO project, showing step‑by‑step how to use the Cursor AI agent to accelerate development, from requirement analysis and task breakdown to code generation, review, testing, and workflow automation, while sharing practical prompts and Erlang code examples.
This guide explains how to install Erlang, download and compile RabbitMQ 3.0.4, start the server in detached mode, verify its status, and troubleshoot common issues such as port conflicts on CentOS 6, providing complete command‑line instructions and configuration tips.
This tutorial walks you through installing Erlang, downloading the RabbitMQ server, starting it in detached mode, verifying its status, and troubleshooting common TCP‑listener errors on CentOS systems, providing all necessary commands and configuration details.
This guide walks you through installing Erlang, downloading and building RabbitMQ 3.0.4 from source on a Linux system, verifying the installations, starting the server in detached mode, checking its status, and troubleshooting common port‑conflict issues on CentOS 6.
This guide walks you through installing Erlang, downloading and extracting RabbitMQ 3.0.4, starting the server in detached mode, verifying its status, and troubleshooting common port‑conflict errors on CentOS 6, with complete command‑line examples.
This guide explains what RabbitMQ is, walks through installing Erlang and RabbitMQ on a Linux system, shows how to start and verify the server, and provides troubleshooting tips for common startup errors such as port conflicts.
This article introduces Gleam, a type‑safe functional language that compiles to Erlang and JavaScript, walks through installation, a hello‑world program, package management, pattern matching with algebraic data types, and demonstrates its concurrency‑friendly, null‑free design.
This article outlines Jan Koum's WhatsApp journey and the eight engineering principles—single responsibility, Erlang stack, reuse of open source, cross‑cutting concerns, diagonal scaling, continuous feedback, load testing, and a small team—that enabled massive scalability with a tiny engineering group.
Based on the latest Stack Overflow developer survey, this article highlights five lesser‑known programming languages—Zig, Erlang, F#, Ruby, and Clojure—detailing their average salaries, key features, and sample code to help developers expand their skill set and boost earnings.
Version 25.1 of Erlang/OTP, the first maintenance patch for OTP 25, introduces production‑ready OpenSSL 3.0 crypto support, fixes a critical CVE‑2022‑37026 SSL/TLS client‑authentication bypass, adjusts engine loading behavior, and includes various minor bug fixes and enhancements.
This tutorial walks through downloading compatible Erlang versions, installing RabbitMQ on Windows, starting the service, verifying its status, and accessing the management UI with default credentials, providing a complete setup for backend development with RabbitMQ.
According to Stack Overflow’s 2022 developer survey, niche languages such as Clojure, Erlang, F#, Ruby, Elixir, Scala and Perl command the highest average salaries—often exceeding $100,000—while mainstream languages like JavaScript and HTML/CSS rank lower, reflecting market scarcity and demand for specialized skills.
This article explains how EMQX 3.0 maintains routing and distribution layers, detailing the subscriber tables, shared‑subscription handling, topic‑trie structures, route look‑ups, and the Erlang code that drives message matching and dispatch across a clustered broker.
This article introduces the open‑source EMQX MQTT broker, explains the MQTT protocol basics, and provides an in‑depth analysis of the broker's connection and session processes—including their state structures, message flows for connect, subscribe, unsubscribe, ping, disconnect, and QoS 0/1/2 publishing—supported by illustrative code snippets and diagrams.
The article details Qunar's in‑house instant messaging platform, covering its purpose, protocol choices (XMPP with protocol‑buffer optimization), architecture based on ejabberd, message flow, reliability mechanisms, extensions such as bots and HTTP APIs, as well as extensive system‑level tuning for high‑concurrency TCP connections.
In this interview, Apache CouchDB project leaders Adam Kocoloski and Jan Lehnardt discuss the database's unique replication model, strengths and weaknesses, notable real‑world deployments, upcoming 3.0 and 4.0 releases, Kubernetes deployment advice, and guidance for newcomers to Erlang and the CouchDB community.
The article details a performance bottleneck investigation of an Erlang‑based service experiencing high CPU usage, describing the use of recon tools, pressure testing, analysis of Kafka and Nginx impacts, and the subsequent optimizations that doubled throughput to meet business requirements.
Over the past decade, Erlang has evolved from a niche functional language into a robust platform with powerful concurrency, fault tolerance, and a rich ecosystem, illustrated by its key applications, knowledge ladder, recent improvements, and future prospects for both Erlang and its Elixir community.
The article commemorates Joe Armstrong, the creator of Erlang, outlining his life, the language’s origins, its impact on high‑availability systems, and his enduring advice for developers about thoughtful coding and avoiding fatigue.
The article commemorates Joe Armstrong, the creator of Erlang, outlining his life, contributions to fault‑tolerant distributed computing, his influential talks in China, and the programming wisdom he shared, while providing links to his historic presentations.
This guide details high‑concurrency system performance metrics, testing methodologies using Tsung, and practical Linux and Erlang configuration tweaks—including kernel parameters, file descriptor limits, port ranges, and VM settings—to improve throughput, reduce latency, and effectively identify bottlenecks in production environments.
This article examines WhatsApp's high‑reliability architecture, detailing how a tiny team of 32 engineers leverages Erlang, FreeBSD, and custom BEAM patches to support hundreds of nodes, thousands of cores, and hundreds of terabytes of memory for over 450 million active users.
This guide explains how to install RabbitMQ, set up a three-node Erlang-based cluster on CentOS, configure hostnames, Erlang cookies, designate disk and RAM nodes, manage services, enable mirrored queues, and verify cluster status using command‑line tools.
Over the course of a week, the author explores Elixir’s design and features—covering its pipe operator, sigils, macro quoting, version handling, and differences from Erlang—while reflecting on language ergonomics, code readability, and functional programming concepts illustrated with concrete code examples.
This article dissects WhatsApp’s high‑reliability architecture that supports 450 million users, detailing its Erlang‑based backend, hardware choices, scaling techniques, monitoring tools, and the engineering lessons learned from pushing a single server to two‑million concurrent connections.
Over the past two years WhatsApp has dramatically expanded its user base, hardware, and traffic while maintaining a tiny engineering team, highlighting the challenges of massive scalability, Erlang‑based distributed design, Mnesia database bottlenecks, decoupling strategies, and operational patches required to keep the service reliable.
The article analyzes WhatsApp's high‑scalability backend architecture, detailing its Erlang‑based server stack, massive user statistics, hardware deployment, custom protocols, performance‑tuning tools, and lessons learned from scaling to billions of messages with a tiny engineering team.
This article shares practical Erlang optimization techniques for game back‑ends, covering node architecture choices, efficient message broadcasting, caching strategies, process design, code conventions, automation, monitoring, and profiling tools to improve performance and maintainability.
This article introduces Erlang as a general‑purpose concurrent language, highlighting its fault‑tolerant runtime, simple 550‑line syntax, pattern‑matching capabilities, process creation with spawn, and practical examples using the ibrowse HTTP library to demonstrate message passing and distributed computing.
Eric Merritt explains how Erlang’s BEAM VM differs from other VMs with its actor‑based, per‑process garbage collection and efficient asynchronous I/O, discusses the motivations behind Joxa, offers a balanced view on Elixir, explores language laziness, type‑system considerations, and mentions emerging technologies like micro‑kernels and Nix.
In this interview, Erlang VM veteran Eric Merritt explains how BEAM’s actor‑based garbage collection, built‑in asynchronous I/O, and design choices differentiate it from other VMs, while also discussing the motivations behind Joxa, his views on Elixir, laziness, type systems, and emerging technologies he follows.
This article examines WhatsApp’s high‑reliability architecture that supports 450 million users, detailing its Erlang‑based backend, hardware choices, scaling techniques, performance metrics, monitoring tools, and lessons learned from achieving up to two million concurrent connections on a single server.
This article examines how WhatsApp grew its user base, message volume, and infrastructure dramatically over two years while keeping the engineering team at ten, detailing the architectural choices, Erlang‑based stack, hardware scaling, decoupling strategies, and the operational challenges that led to both performance gains and a major outage.
This article reviews several Erlang-based web servers and frameworks—including Yaws, Mochiweb, Misultin, Cowboy, httpd, SimpleBridge, webmachine, Nitrogen, Zotonic, and Chicago Boss—highlighting their features, documentation quality, integration with supervision trees, and suitability for building high‑performance HTTP services.
