8. Future directions
It is clear that Erlang is suitable for programming a wide range of soft real-time control applications. What is less clear is if Erlang is suitable for programming applications with very demanding real-time requirements.
Research efforts in the Ericsson Computer Science Laboratory are concerned with a number of interesting problems:
-Efficient implementation of Erlang. Here we are investigating several techniques - these include native code compilation of Erlang and porting Erlang to run on multi-processor architectures.
-Efficient implementation of protocol software in Erlang. We are investigating how to implement TCP/IP directly in Erlang.
-Typed Erlang. A prototype type checker for Erlang has been written by Simon Marlow and Phil Wadler of the University of Glasgow