4 ms·

I just started a new project in Elixir (aimed at systems administrators), and am very excited about using it for what it is good at, and breaking out to system

I just started a new project in Elixir (aimed at systems administrators), and am very excited about using it for what it is good at, and breaking out to system for what it's not good at. To the author, this is one of the best summary writeups I have seen on it, and I read every elixir thing that comes across hn or elixir radar. I think there should be more emphasis that just because elixir doesn't necessarily do computationally heavy stuff easily, there is nothing to stop you from using elixir as the job handler and then use something else for the heavy part. There are also some things which I think might do well in elixir we might not think of. For example, on the irc chan I was told if you call a system call from elixir/erlang you lose the concurrency... so why not write somethings in elixir that were in system, for example, icmp/snmp query?

rubiquity 10y ago
Very cool! I've had lots of ideas around how Elixir would be great for building orchestration or provisioning tools. The concurrency model and immutability are fantastic for that kind of work. Regarding system calls and concurrency: Erlang does lots and lots of system calls. I think what that/those person/people were talking about are NIFs (Natively Implemented Functions) written in C. Those block the scheduler while calling out to C. However, that is a thing of the past with the implementation of dirty schedulers. AFAIK, Erlang/OTP 18 added better control of dirty scheduling and I think version 19 builds on that some more.
bjz_ 10y ago
Rustler looks quite nice for embedding native code in Elixir btw: https://github.com/hansihe/Rustler https://github.com/hansihe/Rustler - I had some issues getting it running at first, but the author was very responsive.