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I have written apps in both Scala Akka and Erlang / Elixir. You can't directly compare JRuby + Akka vs Elixir. The former is just an insane stack. Akka is plain
by rad_gruchalski 10y ago
I have written apps in both Scala Akka and Erlang / Elixir. You can't directly compare JRuby + Akka vs Elixir. The former is just an insane stack. Akka is plain ugly in Java and gets you nowhere near the simplicity of Elixir / Erlang. Elixir isn't emulating Ruby, the syntax is based on Ruby. That's it. I also do not find Akka as pleasant to work with as Erlang / Elixir.
Regarding the types on BEAM, there are types: maps, records, binaries, atoms, numbers, booleans... there's no classes but one does not need classes. Actors replace objects perfectly fine.
- agentgt 10y agoI agree that Akka is ugly (my company doesn't even use it) and I totally agree that you don't need classes (and you don't really have to in Scala and Clojure... even in Java you can just uses classes as though they were structs). I only mention JRuby as many folks switching from Elixir are Ruby shops. Personally I find the actor model too heavy (programming wise) for local concurrency and rather use some other message passing for distributed programming (zeromq, rabbitmq, kafka, etc). I know people hate damn queues and reactive programming but that is what I know (and I admit it is less efficient and more error prone than builtin green threads (go) or actors). I realize now Elixir makes it damn easy because it is all in one package it is just a shame that there isn't some ML like language that compiles to Erlang bytecode.
- ramchip 10y ago> it is just a shame that there isn't some ML like language that compiles to Erlang bytecode. There is! https://github.com/alpaca-lang/alpaca https://github.com/alpaca-lang/alpaca It's very new, though. I wouldn't write production stuff in it just yet.