Erlang vs C#

Erlang has strong roots with the telecom industry in which concurrent processes are normal. It's designed to be concurrent, to be used for distributed computing and to be scalable.

Fault tolerance means that a system has the property to continue operating even though one or more components have failed.

For Erlang systems, this means that the system is kept running even if for example a user has to drop a phone call rather than forcing everyone else to do so.

In order to achieve this, Erlang's VM gives you:

• Knowledge of when a process died and why that happened
• The ability to force processes to die together if they depend on each other and if one of them has a fault.
• A logger that logs every uncaught exception
• Nodes that can be monitored so that you find out when they go down
• The ability to restart failed processes (or groups of them)

In a real-time system it may not be possible to stop the system in order to implement code upgrades. For these cases Erlang gives you dynamic code upgrade support for free when using OTP. The mechanism is very easy to understand and works as follows:

1. Start the app
2. Edit the code
3. Recompile

That's all that is needed, the app updates with the new code while it's still running and tests are run automatically.

Erlang is made to be parallel and distributed. Because it's very easy to write code that uses multiple processor cores, it's also very easy to write applications that span multiple servers.

Erlang has been used in production for more than 20 years now. During that time it has proven itself over and over again that works great in both small startups and large-scale enterprise systems.

Erlang has been used extensively by Ericsson themselves. For example, the AXD301 ATM, which is one of Ericsson's flagships is probably the largest Erlang project ever with more than 1.1 million lines of Erlang code.

Erlang's processes have very little overhead (about 500 bytes per process). This means that a huge amount of processes can be created, even on older machines.

Erlang's processes run in a complete independent way from the OS (they aren't managed by the OS scheduler neither). This means that programs written in Erlang will run exactly the same way regardless of the operating system or platform.

.NET offers rich functionality.

The Visual Studio IDE offers one of the best development environments. The Community Edition and Visual Studio Code can be used for free.

Can be designed visually with the Visual Studio designer for traditional Windows forms, WPF, or Web forms.

Lot's of tools and libraries available.

With Xamarin for Mobile (ios, android),
with .net core asp for server (linux, windows),
with .net core for desktop (windows, mac),
with mono for desktop (windows, linux),
with blazor for web client with webassembly.

However, it is not considered top for any of those categories, but it is top choice for Windows desktop with .net framework and top choice for Unity.

.net 5 will unify frameworks similar to JVM (just one).

Runs on Linux, Mac, and Windows.

Constant updates and bug fixes to many popular frameworks, as well as great first-party support from Microsoft. This can be a con as well in certain circumstances.

Being a C like language counts in favor for it as a general purpose programming language, given the ease of using existing skills to pick up this language easily.

There are other superior languages that could be used as a general purpose, such as: F#, Haskell, but the complexity of those languages, being functional, make them strange to the usual C Syntax.

C# is better than C whenever garbage collection, Objects, classes, data access, are needed. But C is going to be the choice when hardware access and performance are paramount.