Erlang is a programming language used to build massively scalable soft real-time systems with requirements on high availability. Some of its uses are in telecoms, banking, e-commerce, computer telephony and instant messaging. Erlang's runtime system has built-in support for concurrency, distribution and fault tolerance. OTP is set of Erlang libraries and design principles providing middle-ware to develop these systems. It includes its own distributed database, applications to interface towards other languages, debugging and release handling tools. Erlang/OTP is available as pre-built binary packages by most OS package managers. You can use Kerl, a script that lets you easily build Erlang with a few commands. We take security bugs in Erlang/OTP seriously. The Erlang distribution includes a step-by-step getting started guide.
Features
- Erlang is a general-purpose programming language and runtime environment
- Erlang has built-in support for concurrency, distribution and fault tolerance
- OTP (Open Telecom Platform) is a large collection of libraries for Erlang for compiling ASN.1 and provide a WWW server
- Erlang provides a simple and powerful model for error containment and fault tolerance (supervised processes)
- The OTP libraries provide support for many common problems in networking and telecommunications systems
- Erlang's distribution mechanisms are transparent, programs need not be aware that they are distributed