Comparing C++ and ERLANG for motorola telecoms software

Abstract

There is considerable folklore suggesting that ERLANG aids the rapid production of robust distributed systems, but only a few rather general studies published. This talk reports the first systematic comparative evaluation of ERLANG in the context of substantial commercial products.Our research strategy is to re-engineer two C++/CORBA telecoms applications in ERLANG and make comparative measurements of both implementations. The first component is a medium-scale (15K line) Dispatch Call Controller (DCC), and the second a smaller (3K line) Data Mobility (DM) component that is closely integrated with five other components of a radio communications subsystem (RCS). To investigate interoperation costs we have constructed two DMs: a pure ERLANG implementation and an ER-LANG/C implementation that reuses some C DM libraries.We investigate the following six research questions, first considering the potential benefits of a high-level distributed language technology like ERLANG.