There seems to be an interesting attraction between Erlang and Lisp and several times it has been tried to marry them, in different ways. Bill Clementson wrote about it already in his article Concurrent/Parallel Programming - The Next Generation . Here is an updated list:

And this list does not even include projects like (again defunct?) Kali Scheme, which are clearly related.

Personally, I think that the reimplementation approach will have a tough stance against integration approaches like Distel. They lock out either one or the other of the two language eco-systems: libraries, development tools, etc., and recreating this is a lot of work (but don't let that stop you!) With Distel, I can choose to program parts of the application in ELisp or Erlang, whatever is a better fit.

Distel implements Erlang's on-the-wire protocol, which is nice because there is no need to mess around with a Foreign Function Interface. Alternatively, one could bind to the Erlang C libraries. As far as rapid prototyping is concerned, this should be the fastest and most straight-forward approach. I wonder why everybody is doing it the hard way (reimplementation)?





A helpful reader on reddit rightly pointed out that I forgot to include ETOS, now rectified.





Bill Clementson wrote a nice summary of the Erlang Interoperability options. Thanks again, Bill!





Grant Rettke pointed me to another Lisp-Erlang marriage: erlang-scheme



