That's valid, hard real time problems require guarantees that erlang can't give, that was an unwarranted exaggeration on my part. But anything that needs to be very long running (years or more) will need ironclad guarantees that it won't be leaking resources and I can't prove but suspect that erlang will do a lot better than go for those applications. Let's leave the nuclear plants and the assembly lines to RTos and QnX then :).
"require guarantees that erlang can't give" ... at the moment, working on it.
In the meantime note that the percentage of stuff that really needs hard realtime in many systems is quite low. What I do at the moment is run Erlang on RTEMS (see my other posts) keep the hard realtime parts as simple as possible (always a good idea), write them in C and run them on a higher prio than the Erlang runtime which handles all the complicated things. Works like a breeze in practice
