High-Level Distribution for the Rapid Production of Robust Telecoms Software: Comparing C++ and Erlang

Currently most distributed telecoms software is engineered using low and mid-level distributed technologies, but there is a drive to use high-level distribution. This paper reports the first systematic comparison of a high-level distributed programming language in the context of substantial commercial products. The authors' research strategy is to re-engineer some C++/CORBA telecoms applications in Erlang, a high-level distributed language, and make comparative measurements. Investigating the potential advantages of the high-level Erlang technology shows that two significant benefits are realised.