I'm surprised Erlang isn't used more often. Out of the box it seems to solve a lot of the hard scaling problems many business face now. Maybe it's just too exotic.
I wonder if they could have been as successful with Scala + Akka. They mention a desire for at least limited static typing at the end of the slides. In my experience well-defined, statically typed interface declarations can eliminate a lot of dumb bugs.
Apparently the consensus is that Erlang is amazing for 'lower-level' infrastructure code but not so great for high-level business code. I wonder if Reia and Elxir might play a role in changing that...
I'm sure they could have done everything in Erlang, but they mentioned that they only have four developers that do Erlang within the company. Erlang developers aren't as prevalent as Python/Ruby developers.
I thought they implemented game network code, scalably. That would be cool. So I was a little bit disappointed when read that they only keep stats using Erlang.
I should clarify a bit. I think that contemporary FPS need real-time game server logic. When I saw link title I thought they finally ported some game code to Erlang.
All stuff you mentioned has nothing to do with game logic.
It does not require hard real-time response like one required from network game server.
And yes, I already know that I could use Erlang for non-hard-real-time tasks.
Akka is attempting to bring as many Erlang features as possible to Scala. They're doing a great job, but imho they won't be able to go all the way due to JVM lacking certain features
I wonder if they could have been as successful with Scala + Akka. They mention a desire for at least limited static typing at the end of the slides. In my experience well-defined, statically typed interface declarations can eliminate a lot of dumb bugs.