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Elixir is a great project, I'm saying this as someone who wrote Erlang full-time in 2007-2009. It's attracting a lot of attention to an amazing platform (I don'
by hassy 11y ago
Elixir is a great project, I'm saying this as someone who wrote Erlang full-time in 2007-2009. It's attracting a lot of attention to an amazing platform (I don't get to write much Erlang anymore, but it's still my favorite language by far).
Articles like this one though are doing it a disservice in my opinion. It's heavy on hype and subjective opinion, light on facts and outright misleading in a few places, for example:
- 1-1.5kb of memory per process is for a process that does nothing. It's less overhead than any other platform I know of, but I am not sure how that translates to: "Want to keep track of a large portfolio of stocks? Easy. Want to keep track of the whole market? No sweat."
- 9 9s uptime is a function of architecture, not language. OTP makes it easier to build resilient systems, but it's not a silver bullet and there's a tonne to learn in order to just use OTP effectively. Elixir is not going to give you anything for free.
"Massive parallelism also results in massive redundancy." - how exactly? My massively parallel application could be running on one machine. The author must have meant distribution which Erlang/OTP is indeed very good at.
"Want to coordinate across markets or geographies?"
You would certainly not want to distribute an Erlang cluster across two different data centers, much less geographies.
"Add more hardware, and Elixir's performance will increase almost linearly along with it."
No it won't - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law
"Moreover, whereas Erlang was built to run on telecom networks, Elixir is built to run websites, phone apps and web services. New and exciting stuff."
What? Elixir runs on top of BEAM, the exact same VM that Erlang runs on. Moreover, using Elixir in your typical 12Factor web-app makes very little sense - you wouldn't be benefitting from any of OTP and taking a hit on development time due to lack of libraries.