Glossary
Erlang (programming language)
A functional programming language built to excel at concurrent, distributed and fault-tolerant systems — the backbone of high-load chat, messaging and telecom platforms.
General definition
Erlang is a functional programming language designed for concurrent, distributed and fault-tolerant systems. It is widely used for chat and messaging, as well as telecom and real-time high-load use cases in finance and online betting.
It was created by Joe Armstrong, Robert Virding and Mike Williams at Ericsson in 1986, and its runtime (Erlang/OTP) is engineered to keep systems running for years with minimal downtime.
Erlang in the Ethora ecosystem
Ethora uses Erlang for a core part of its stack — though not the majority of the codebase. It powers the chat server (via Ejabberd) and custom XEP extensions over XMPP, plus backend services such as statistics and push notifications built on Erlang/OTP.
As Ethora Founder & CEO Taras Filatov puts it: “Once you build stuff in Erlang it just works for years. It’s fantastic for communications and messaging because it supports millions of concurrent processes and is super fault tolerant.”
