Erlang/OTP R13A has been released

febeling · on March 17, 2009

Also new the single run queue bottleneck removed, single node will be able to take advantage of more than 8 cores.

FraaJad · on March 17, 2009

Has wxErlang support. Now, GUIs can be built with Erlang!

davidw · on March 17, 2009

It's always been possible, utilizing Tk.

For example:

    Eshell V5.6.3  (abort with ^G)
    1> debugger:start().
    {ok,<0.32.0>}

Or, to see all your processes:

    pman:start().

Truth be told though, I think you'd be better off using something like Tcl or Ruby for GUI coding.

daleharvey · on March 17, 2009

I find web interfaces a perfect fit for erlang, with lightweight http servers you can add to your application at little cost, startup a web server with your application and you can code the gui in xhtml / css / javascript, you get can use the app remotely for free :)

quite a few of the erlang standard tools can be ran this way

davidw · on March 18, 2009

Web interfaces are not bad for Erlang, although my intuition says the real sweet spot would be in doing the GUI in Javascript and simply passing JSON back and forth. HTML templates with Erlang are unpleasant compared to something like Ruby or Tcl, which were made to be very DSL'y and good at mangling text. So if you can skip the text wrangling and HTML templates and simply offload that to Javascript, that makes Erlang more competitive.

bitdiddle · on March 18, 2009

agreed, this is one of the things making CouchDB something to consider

gordonguthrie · on March 17, 2009

Now with unicode support

mononcqc · on March 17, 2009

Apparently both in strings and binaries. Great programming-related news if any.

rjurney · on March 17, 2009

Were the > 16 core performance problems addressed?

daleharvey · on March 18, 2009

erlang now has a run queue per core as opposed to a single run queue, which will improve things, and they have also improved message passing characteristics and ets table locking optimisations.

the "problems" with >16 (and even >2) cores have not particularly been with the erlang runtime, quite often its an inherent problem with the application or at least the way its been written

blasdel · on March 18, 2009

It's not like you couldn't always just run multiple native processes on one machine.