37 Signals, creators of Rails, embrace Erlang, where it makes sense

You may be familiar with 37 Signals, the guys who brought us Ruby on Rails, Campfire, Basecamp, among other products. Mark makes a wonderful case for using the right tool for the job in this “Nuts & Bolts” post, on how the Campfire internals work better with Erlang.

Campfire is a web based messaging/chatroom system that used a C-based polling system to determine if messages needed to be sent to connected browsers. The team replaced 240 separate C processes with 3 Erlang processes, and they explain how and why here.