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What is Erlang written in?

I hear somewhere erlang is more efficient than c/c++,the only possibility would be that the language itself is written in assembly or even machine code.

So which language is erlang implemented in?

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marked as duplicate by Jared Farrish, Jerry Coffin, sarnold, Dustin, jonsca Jun 10 '11 at 6:49


False precept. If you implemented a compiler in something that ran slowly, that would only mean the compiler itself ran slowly, but would not affect the speed of the programs it produced. Most compilers are written to be self-hosting though -- except for the very first one (that's normally thrown away almost immediately), compilers are written in the language they compile. You bootstrap a new version by compiling with the older version, then immediately use the new compiler to compile its own source code. –  Jerry Coffin Jun 10 '11 at 3:56
Many parts of the Erlang runtime system are implemented in Erlang itself,but there are few exceptions to this. Like BIFs(Built in functions) are usually written in C and integrated into the virtual machine(VM).Other BIFs such as length/1 and Ets tables are implemented in the runtime system for efficiency and have different performance characteristics than ordinary erlang objects. –  niting112 Jun 13 '11 at 13:31
Erlang is not more efficient per se, but if you program multicore, it probably will be giving the difficulty of getting parallel programming right in c/c++ –  Magnus Kronqvist Jun 26 '12 at 15:37

1 Answer 1

up vote 1 down vote accepted

What is Erlang written in?

Answer: Erlang

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is it just a slogan to say it's more efficient than c? –  cpuer Jun 10 '11 at 3:50
