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From the book "Learn you some Erlang for Great Good:"

Erlang is no silver bullet and will be particularly bad at things like image and signal processing, operating system device drivers, and other functions.

Now, operating system device drivers, sure, but is there any reason why Erlang couldn't be used for digital signal procesing? What is the author alluding to here? Is it just that Erlang would display poor performance in a DSP application, or is there a particular reason why it might be structurally unsuited for the job? (I'm not thinking about using it for DSP, I'm just curious.)

Cygil
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Is it just that Erlang would display poor performance in a DSP application

Not just that: you also won't find many (if any) libraries which help you with that, and you may find Erlang's benefits not of much use in these domains. This applies to "number crunching" in general, image and signal processing are just examples.

Alexey Romanov
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While my answer might not be accurate but I think Erlang isn't suitable for "Signal Processing" for the following reasons (of course, it might be there are more reasons. Feel free to correct me):

  • Erlang lacks the advanced Math libraries. MATLAB is quite impressive in this aspect.
  • You can't use Erlang for Embedded Software in Real-Time Signal Processing Systems.
Chiron
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I think the main reason is that erlang is not terribly fast, and this would show up in applications with a lot of number crunching. Erlang's strengths are in concurrency and fault tolerance, and these are less relevant in applications like image processing (with little or no concurrency).

OTOH, erlang is good at working with binary data, and it's quite good at parallelism. The hardcore number-crunching parts of a DSP application could be farmed off to C libraries (via ports or linked-in drivers or NIFs). Erlang is a language for soft real-time applications and it's quite at home as embedded software.

So, DSP is not erlang's home turf, but erlang could still be a good fit for a particular DSP (or a particular DSP programmer).

Ivan Uemlianin
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