Although not in Erlang, Discord uses Elixir which runs on the BEAM VM to much success as well for our real time distributed system as well as VOIP signaling components. Looking back years later - it’s safe to say we wouldn’t have chosen anything else.
Not OP, but have used Elixir pretty extensively; the major selling points for me are the friendlier syntax and more active community support, plus with rebar3 + Elixir's seamless Erlang interop you really don't give up anything, you can use any existing Erlang/Elixir libraries with a single syntax. It's pretty great.
One of the big differences between Erlang and Elixir is indeed that Elixir allows you to write macros in the language itself, using quote / unquote constructs just like lisps.
This makes it easy to generate code on compile time, which is then executed in runtime without any performance penalty.
A large part of Elixir itself is actually implemented as macros. For instance, the "unless" construct:
defmacro unless(condition, do: do_clause, else: else_clause) do
quote do
if(unquote(condition), do: unquote(else_clause), else: unquote(do_clause))
end
end
Your question is very vague. What exactly do you mean by "the same results"? And which "alternative tools"? How do those tools provide "an alternative"?
I don't think you're getting downvoted because you're not praising a piece of technology; you're getting downvoted because your tone seems rude, arrogant, and like you're on a witch-hunt rather than an honest inquiry. While tech fan-clubs do exist on HN, in my experience they respond quite constructively to reasoned criticism--if it's not phrased in an unkind way.
I'm not for or against Erlang. While honestly attempting to learn something new today, I became frustrated with how devoid of content most of the comments in this thread are. "I'm {senior title}, and {tech name} is great" is as far as most of the comments go. That's just extremely mediocre.
A comment section isn't the place to look for detailed content so why get frustrated about the brevity here? There are plenty of places to deep dive in the internet.
