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lasp-lang
partisan
Erlang2017–2025
lasp-lang / partisan

partisan

High-performance, high-scalability distributed computing for the BEAM.

10Distinct people
10Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
1.1KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

High-performance, high-scalability distributed computing for the BEAM.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year10 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2017-05-22 15:46:17 UTC to 2025-07-23 00:39:30 UTC.

0123452017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20172018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 1 submissions, 4 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20212022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2025

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC514
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

10 sources
I was curious about this claim, so I tracked it down: https://blog.stenmans.org/theBeamBook/#_distribution_in_a_la... > Even though Erlang’s asynchronous message-passing model allows it to handle network latency effectively, a process does not need to wait for a response after sending a message, allowing it to continue executing other tasks. It is still discouraged to use Erlang distribution in a geographically distributed system. The Erlang distribution was designed for communication within a data center or preferably within the same rack in a data center. For geographically distributed systems other asynchronous communication patterns are suggested. Not clear why they make this claim, but I think it refers to how Erlang/OTP handles distribution out of the box. Tools like Partisan seem to provide better defaults: https://github.com/lasp-
Read the rest
In Swift-erlang-actor-system
> I do wonder if maybe streaming large data chunks over Erlang distribution might be a problem and a secondary data channel (e.g. over udp or sctp) might be worth playing with. You may want to take a look at the partisan[0] library written in Erlang. It is basically that, a reimagination of distributed Erlang, except that it can be multiplexed over multiple connections. [0] - https://github.com/lasp-lang/partisan/
In Distributed Machine Learning Notebooks with Elixir and Livebook
I can also mirror this general guideline. I've run 250+ node erlang clusters just fine in the past. There were some caveats to how some built-in OTP libraries behaved but they were easy to replace or workaround in the past. That was many years ago as well. The distributed erlang story has improved with more recent releases (better performance on remote monitors for example) which might push the number a little higher than 300 if you are careful. Keep in mind the default style of clustering is fully connected so there is some danger in managing that many network connections (quadratically scaling for each node added) during network partitions which can be a problem if you're not tuning things like TCP's TIME_WAIT for local networking conditions. Even better, these days there are great libraries like partisan (https://github.com/lasp-lang/p
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artisan) which can scale to much larger cluster sizes and can be dropped in for most distributed erlang uses cases w/o much effort.
In Elixir Is Erlang, not Ruby
In large Erlang applications, the "send to multiple peers" broadcast tendencies of its message passing can indeed cause the network to become a bottleneck; so can the default chattiness that a lot of Erlang application developers assume for their app behavior. Fortunately, there are lots of simple-to-apply patterns and solutions when you get to that point, for example the excellent Partisan library: https://github.com/lasp-lang/partisan
In What Erlang Taught Me About Distributed Systems
I, too, have a bit of experience with backpressure implementations in both Erlang and Pony. Erlang's "penalize the sender" doesn't work in many cases, so I'm not surprised that it's being removed. Erlang's remote distribution implementation & messaging semantics are Mostly Great but is definitely not Perfect. 1. Head-of-line blocking caused by congestion on the single TCP connection used for message transmission between any two Erlang nodes. This can cause major problems for apps control vs. data plane design, such as Riak and Lasp. Work on Partisan (https://github.com/lasp-lang/partisan) appears to be a substantial improvement. 2. If the single remote distribution TCP connection between two nodes is broken, then the first Erlang process to send a message to the remote node is, hrrm, well, borrowed/co-opted by the BEAM VM to connect th
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e new TCP session. IIRC that process is marked unrunnable by the scheduler until the connection is set up or perhaps there's an error. If that process is really important to the functioning of your app, for example, an important system manager in the control plane of the app, then you have a very difficult-to-diagnose latency Heisenbug to cope with. -Scott
In Stream Processing for Go

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