> It turns out that many of the traits of Erlang systems overlap with that of the Rovers. But I don't think this is a coincidence. The software has certain different properties — the rovers are hard realtime whereas the erlang systems are soft realtime.
> The things that do not overlap has to do with the need of having soft realtime vs hard realtime. In Erlang we can yield service. It is bad, but we can do it. On a rover it can be disastrous. Especially in the flight control software. Fire a rocket too late and you are in trouble.
The OTP virtual machine takes a lot of memory. It's an interpretter, which means much slower execution, as article and others above pointed - The Erlang VM is soft-realtime, it can't guarantee that something would finish in certain amount of micro or milliseconds, or if it does guarantee - it's too much for what they need (just guessing here).
But the concepts are very similar - message passing being the way to communicate between modules, rather than shared memory ways.
This brings another topic - the Linux vs Minix debate :) - I guess there are right things to be done for the right time, and right target. It's just getting all these things right is the hardest.
