Question

I realize that they are different beast used to solve different problems, but I would like to ask for an enumerated list of advantages of Erlang over node.js (and vice-versa). When would you use one over the other?

Answer 1

Erlang is a language and a runtime. I’m assuming you wish a comparison of the erlang runtime with node.js

First I’ll list the similarities:

• Both lend themselves to event driven programming.
• Both focus on highly asynchronous programming.

And then then the advantages Erlang has:

• Erlangs message passing abstracts the differences between local and distributed processes making distributed programming easier.
• Erlangs hot code loading allows for in place releases on running services without disrupting any current activity.
• Erlang has superior tools for packaging and deployment.
• Erlangs supervisor and gen_server behviors provide a superior framework for building extremely robust and fault tolerant systems.