Re: Quote from comp.object
Date: 5 Mar 2007 11:48:34 -0800
Message-ID: <1173124113.831764.101300_at_s48g2000cws.googlegroups.com>
On Mar 5, 11:34 am, "Marshall" <marshall.spi..._at_gmail.com> wrote:
> Erlang for example is a programming language whose computational
> model can support hundreds of thousands of simultaneous processes,
> yet has very high reliability and uptime.
I could be convinced of this. It's an attractive idea, but speaking purely as a plumber, you're going to have a very hard time convincing me that higher level 'functional' languages are a practical platform for implementing something like a DBMS. DBMS internals do all kinds of evil, ugly things purely for performance. It ought not be this way -- Hell! My first love was LISP -- but each time someone has made a foray into systems programming using higher level languages we rediscover the virtues of lower level languages. It has nothing to do with the theory. It's that higher level languages place more demands on the quality of the compiler / interpreter.
Also, my limited experience suggests that the overhead of coordinating
the 'hundreds of thousands of simultaneous processes' begins, at some
point, to swamp the marginal return of adding another concurrent subtask.
Of course, I still program in 'C' using 'vi'.