58 engineers on Hacker News describe using Erlang first-hand: 21 endorse it, 2 regret it, 9 are mixed.
“Erlang is simply the right language to build a chat server with”
endorse · production · toast0 · 2026-09-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“it does highlight that erlang/beam/otp has great primitives for building reliable production systems.”
endorse · personal · edude03 · 2024-11-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I wrote some of Jepsen in Erlang too, but abandoned the project quickly. It's got a really good concurrency story... I love Erlang as a language (and I think some of my Erlang might still be in prod!)”
mixed · production · aphyr · 2023-12-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“dist worked fine over WANs, I think the WA contributed pg addresses the issues we saw with pg2.”
mixed · production · toast0 · 2023-11-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“elixir and erlang are amazing tools.”
endorse · production · chasers · 2023-08-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“tracing Erlang in prod is literally a fun game, and very easy.”
endorse · production · rozap · 2023-07-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We've had zero, absolutely zero issues with all the other stacks.”
endorse · production · brabel · 2022-07-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“on our Erlang machines, we'd run one big Erlang process... which we needed when Erlang TLS was too slow”
mixed · production · toast0 · 2021-09-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“it wasn't nearly as resilient to failure, or as predictable, as the Erlang stuff I've run in prod was.”
endorse · production · lostcolony · 2021-06-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I can query actor state, mailboxes, etc... And I can do all of this in prod.”
endorse · production · lostcolony · 2020-09-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I can assure you erlang is not a 'niche telecom language's, as I have used it, in prod, in so many ways that have nothing to do with telecoms.”
endorse · production · dnautics · 2020-09-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I have some TLS-dependent things in prod and let me say, it is really easy to do TLS in OTP.”
endorse · production · dnautics · 2020-05-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Erlang is incredibly well suited for the task, and it's a terrible choice for us.”
regret · production · 9 yr · as-j · 2019-10-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Hot code upgrades are one of the Erlang features that helps me keep headcount down on our operations team.”
endorse · production · 3 yr · gamache · 2019-06-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We replaced a little over 80k lines of Erlang with around 50k lines of Rust... Erlang likes to run on nodes wth huge amounts of RAM for process mailboxes.”
regret · production · ilovecaching · 2018-10-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've seen Erlang systems in production...even with a rather critical bug in one, the system just -worked- for -years-”
endorse · production · lostcolony · 2017-12-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I have put Java/Scala/Go/Erlang systems in production, and rarely have I have ever had to worry about GC tuning.”
mixed · production · sriram_malhar · 2017-11-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Erlang/OTP is battle-tested and it's really the first time I could comfortably sleep at night without worrying about stuff going down.”
endorse · production · 0.5 yr · weixiyen · 2016-12-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we have Erlang on RTEMS in production since Erlang R16B03 ... we already know it generally works quite well.”
endorse · production · peerst · 2016-12-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Erlang already offers a lot around releases out of the box and in our case The VM + the whole "OS" is just one file to swap so we don't have a lot of problems”
endorse · production · peerst · 2016-12-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Shipping an Erlang app to production was simultaneously one of the happiest and most depressing points in my career.”
mixed · production · MetaCosm · 2015-07-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“erlang's message processing speed is quite high”
endorse · production · felixgallo · 2015-06-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Yes I'd definitely consider Erlang for this type of application. Though at the time that I was implementing an RTB bidder Erlang still did not offer actual multicore support”
mixed · production · cmrdporcupine · 2015-06-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?“a lot of erlang libraries expect strings for configuration text... This hasn't resulted in any real issues though”
mixed · production · benwilson513 · 2015-01-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Erlang's hot code loading, runtime inspection, production quality REPL, and process isolation makes it a completely different language than Go.”
endorse · personal · nosequel · 2014-11-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I was told to learn Erlang and get it done... Erlang was so beautiful and easy that even an average intelligence person like me could use”
endorse · production · radmuzom · 2014-11-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We don't regret moving to Erlang at all. We have no plans to move off of it and are very happy with it.”
endorse · production · mmzyk · 2014-09-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we use it as the logic layer of our open-source Telecom stack. We're definitely down to fly out and promote one of the coolest languages”
endorse · production · josh2600 · 2012-12-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I get lost in the riak sources, because it does so much it overflows my stack, but everything else is easy.”
endorse · personal · nirvana · 2012-08-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We've developed an application we use internally for essentially doing distributed, fault-tolerant timers.”
mixed · production · mxavier · 2011-11-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“In that regard, Erlang has been a rock. We've barely had to touch it during the rampup from 0 to thousands of requests per second.”
mixed · production · 2 yr · trefn · 2011-08-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“i just built a system like this w/Erlang... Erlang is perfect for this. We're running 150K connections right now and it's using about 17% of memory”
endorse · production · rubyrescue · 2011-01-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I just started playing in the Erlang ecosystem and they have EIGHT levels of logging messages.”
neutral · personal · vpribish · 2025-12-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I work at a company that deploys Elixir/Erlang and ... we need to console in and re-define a module in production”
neutral · production · aeturnum · 2024-12-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I use Elixir (lives in the Erlang's BEAM VM so has access to everything Erlang)”
neutral · production · pdimitar · 2023-05-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We've implemented a "leaky-bucket" rate-limiter using Erlang's `:counters` module for "per tenant" rate-limiting.”
neutral · production · kiwicopple · 2022-08-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we migrated all erlang, golang and nodejs code to edge workers on cloudflare and simply did not need to run containers anymore”
neutral · production · jFriedensreich · 2022-08-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?“referencing Erlang since that's the only FP language I'm well-versed in”
neutral · personal · macintux · 2021-11-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I'm much more comfortable with Erlang syntax, though, and wish there was still a viable Erlang web framework.”
neutral · personal · fortran77 · 2020-12-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we run many times the services and experiments on one box with many other services”
neutral · production · joking · 2020-10-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“It took me weeks to understand the ffi header file for the erlang VM, for example.”
neutral · personal · dnautics · 2020-09-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've only done an Erlang tutorial, nothing in prod, so this is just a guess.”
neutral · personal · specialist · 2020-09-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“all of these are either in prod or used to make production artifacts”
neutral · production · dnautics · 2020-01-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I also used to be an Erlang developer and used to play around a bit with McErlang”
neutral · production · im_down_w_otp · 2019-11-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I primarily code in Elixir and Erlang”
neutral · production · QuinnWilton · 2019-11-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run between 200k and 2m processes per beam VM.”
neutral · production · jhgg · 2018-10-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We deploy using Erlang "releases" using systemd for process supervision.”
neutral · production · jake_morrison · 2018-05-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I signed up last week and have been using it to learn Erlang.”
neutral · personal · jetti · 2017-12-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I can accept the semantics to need training to understand (as I did with Perl, Erlang, or now doing with Ada)”
neutral · personal · dozzie · 2017-12-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we were a team of seasoned Erlang developers”
neutral · production · shinydevops · 2016-08-31 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I recently had to develop an Erlang application targeting Debian "stable".”
neutral · production · olgeni · 2015-07-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“my production skill set includes php, c, c++, python, ruby, erlang, scheme, javascript, scala”
neutral · production · Ixiaus · 2014-12-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Erlang, haproxy, rabbitmq, redis, postgres, cassandra, chef”
neutral · production · metabrew · 2013-11-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“this has led me to Clojure, CL, Haskell and Erlang.”
neutral · personal · biscarch · 2012-12-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“the whole thing is written in Erlang.”
neutral · production · josh2600 · 2012-07-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I can find a smattering of things in other languages in our code bases, including Ruby and Erlang”
neutral · production · Ogre · 2011-11-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Every suffiently large Erlang applications include parts written in C. In our case we do JSON parsing in C, we use ZeroMQ, etc.”
neutral · production · nivertech · 2011-11-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“a comparison between 2-years old (probably badly written) Erlang server and a new Python/eventlet server”
neutral · production · nivertech · 2011-08-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?