alt Hacker NewsYou might be speed-running to a conclusion and squinting too hard if you use the word "panacea". Similar to the weird childish name-calling people do in Rust threads (somebody met one brainless zealot and now of course they'll judge a community of hundreds of thousands of devs by that one loony).
I used Java, Golang, Rust, Elixir (so Erlang).
My opinion is informed. STM / share-nothing-actors lend themselves amazingly well to online services for many reasons, better explained by other people and documented elsewhere (and I did not come here to advocate but to express preference and offer the take of somebody who has been around).
I am not denying that the JVM might have almost caught up in the meantime. More than a decade ago it did not.
And yes the BEAM VM is absolutely and markedly _not_ a panacea. It has a few weird sharp edges. It's just that in my work I have found having to avoid them still worth it compared to the alternatives (global mutability and more primitive parallelism which was the case for the JVM for decades).
I have used Clojure(JVM), Elixir(so Erlang) and a bit of Golang professionally too. So my opinion "is informed" too for that matter, but this kind of appeal to authority adds nothing to the discussion.
> I am not denying that the JVM might have almost caught up in the meantime. More than a decade ago it did not.
This presupposes that the JVM had something to catch up in the meantime. Again, this lacks nuance and brings nothing to the table. The JVM makes different trade-offs than the Erlang/Golang VM does, and has different strengths and weaknesses. Both of your comments completely ignores that.
> It's just that in my work I have found having to avoid them still worth it compared to the alternatives (global mutability and more primitive parallelism which was the case for the JVM for decades).
Clojure runs on the JVM and avoids mutability pretty well. It is amazing for writing concurrent software, and has been for many years(i.e more than a decade ago).
> Similar to the weird childish name-calling people do in Rust threads
I've seen people do similar things to the JVM.