Experience report: erlang in acoustic ray tracing

Abstract

We investigated the relative merits of C++ and Erlang in the implementation of a parallel acoustic ray tracing algorithm for the U.S. Navy. We found a much smaller learning curve and better debugging environment for parallel Erlang than for pthreads-based C++ programming. Our C++ implementation outperformed the Erlang program by at least 12x. Attempts to use Erlang on the IBM Cell BE microprocessor were frustrated by Erlang's memory footprint.