Thanks @Hodgman! for your reply.. for some reason this crappy forum software wouldn't even let me thank you without frustration...  dont't let me get into how many times I tried to write that sentence..

5 hours ago, hplus0603 said:

The Erlang solution got started in 2010 or so, and shipped for real in ... 2012? It's still going strong and doing its thing, so I don't think it's "older technology." It's seen at least one major upgrade, to add redundancy in places it didn't have it. (Btw, I think the WhatsApp team is almost entirely on Erlang)

It really is an example of "horses for courses."

So, you're actually saying it works then...

and really, you don't think that something that shipped in 2012 isn't older tech? 

Really?

Honestly.. "horses for courses"???  when I looked it up it said it meant "to each their own" but I'm really not sure that's what you were saying...  Crossbar???

@Hodgman...  Your link?
"we took several recent graph-processing publications from the systems community, and compared the measurements they report to simple single-threaded implementations running on my work laptop (RIP)"  Dude, I'm almost 40 and I've been working up to my neck in tech since before I could talk to girls..  What the h.e.-double-hockey-sticks is this first sentence/the first paragraph/the first page saying?  Really?

graph-processing?

Systems community?

single-threaded implementations of what??

There is way too much intentional obfuscation in this community..   :(

I mean really, I spent 13 years in the trenches of ISP Systems Engineering supporting clients with teams of super smart coders.. They all ended up using some kind of UDP or TCP based netcode that did the job... Whatever black magic they think they were doing, it all boiled down to some kind of upd or tcp connection traffic that WE still had to manage FOR them... no matter how clever their internal workings really were.. 

Your limits are never what you perceive, because your perception is your only limit.

"horses for courses" also means "choose the right tool/engineer/solution for the job."

(There are some other sayings that are more colorful on that topic.)

Quote

you don't think that something that shipped in 2012 isn't older tech?

Everything cool in computers today was probably invented by IBM for mainframes in the '70s.

Virtual machines? Check.
Container deployments? Check.
RISC? Check.
Message queueing systems? Check.
Untyped prototyping scripting languages? No, that was invented in the '50s.

Six years might feel like a long time in an area like, say, front-end JavaScript frameworks, where the platform you're building on, and the businesses doing the building, all evolve daily, because they're not settled yet. Physical networking, however, has had a lot more development going into it. It's not like the fundamental differences between TCP and UDP, or the use-cases they were designed for, have suddenly changed, because the speed of light or the propagation of electricity in wires seem to be exactly the same now, as then :-)

So, crossbar. comes from electric engineering, where it's a "matrix" or "patch panel" that lets you connect any thing to any other thing. I've often seen it used for various kinds of rendez-vous primitives, such as the bottom level of a message queue broker implementation.

Lol, thanks @hplus0603!

My point is, implementation possibilities change month to month these days.  To think that anything designed 6+ years ago is still the state of the art is naive in my perception.

You're right that the physics or the core ideas don't change much or at all.  But implementaions DO.  Newer methods make entire systems behave differently. 

You can't say something you tested last year Will still test the same this year. When you are talking about anything that relies on the internet.  You just can't.

The speed of light or the poropogation of electricity is not at all the actual limiting factor in internet systems.  Regardless of how fast the light moves you can always get new next gen hardware that aggregates MORE bandwidth.  That is what ISPs do on very regular basis.  And every time one of them does that the internet changes just a little bit.  Latencies of effected network segments change, rtt changes.  The entire dynamic changes.

Just because the concepts were born a long time ago doesn't mean the way they work is still the same.