Why hasn't Erlang's Open Telecom Platform (OTP) been ported to other languages?

Question

I'm starting to dive into Erlang for the first time, and OTP is held aloft by lovers and critics alike as being the gold standard for highly available, distributed processing.

Given that OTP has been around for decades and is openly documented, why is it that other languages supporting lightweight threads/processes haven't adopted versions of their own? Are there technical/political challenges? Or does everyone just shrug and learn Erlang?

Thanks!

Answer 1

The largest issue is that most language runtimes don't have built-in lightweight concurrency and error isolation with exit signal propagation. Without those things you would have a really hard time properly porting OTP.

For the languages that do have the right kind of runtime, I am seeing some effort or at least plans to build OTP inspired frameworks. Cloud Haskell is the first that comes to mind. I also expect that Go and Rust will eventually have something like OTP if they don't already.

Answer 2

There are technical challenges, as Erlang itself is designed for the same features OTP is known for. Case in point, Basho Riak is a distributed fault-tolerant key/value store written in Erlang. One might be able to port it to Haskell or some similar functional language, but it would probably be a lot of work. Just for fun, you might look into OTP stuff written in the Elixir language.

Answer 3

Actually, it has been (tried).

Akka is the library which takes some OTP features and implements them in Scala for JVM. Given the principles underlying JVM and BEAM (the Erlang VM) are very different (mainly GC, scheduling and message passing are radically different), I can't say how successful that implementation is and how many benefits of the original OTP it preserves. There's a lot of (heated) debate on that in the internets.