Erlang (programming language)
Erlang (/ˈɜːrlæŋ/ UR-lang) is a general-purpose, concurrent, functional high-level programming language, and a garbage-collected runtime system. The term Erlang is used interchangeably with Erlang/OTP, or Open Telecom Platform (OTP), which consists of the Erlang runtime system, several ready-to-use components (OTP) mainly written in Erlang, and a set of design principles for Erlang programs.
| Paradigms | Multi-paradigm: concurrent, functional, object oriented |
|---|---|
| Designed by |
|
| Developer | Ericsson |
| First appeared | 1986 |
| Stable release | |
| Typing discipline | Dynamic, strong |
| License | Apache License 2.0 |
| Filename extensions | .erl, .hrl |
| Website | www |
| Major implementations | |
| Erlang | |
| Influenced by | |
| Lisp, PLEX, Prolog, Smalltalk | |
| Influenced | |
| Akka, Clojure, Dart, Elixir, F#, Opa, Oz, Reia, Rust, Scala, Go | |
| |
The Erlang runtime system is designed for systems with these traits:
- Distributed
- Fault-tolerant
- Soft real-time
- Highly available, non-stop applications
- Hot swapping, where code can be changed without stopping a system.
The Erlang programming language has immutable data, pattern matching, and functional programming. The sequential subset of the Erlang language supports eager evaluation, single assignment, and dynamic typing.
A normal Erlang application is built out of hundreds of small Erlang processes.
It was originally proprietary software within Ericsson, developed by Joe Armstrong, Robert Virding, and Mike Williams in 1986, but was released as free and open-source software in 1998. Erlang/OTP is supported and maintained by the Open Telecom Platform (OTP) product unit at Ericsson.