6 ms·

> Ruby was optimized for the developer, not for running it in production," says Sid. "For the things that get hit a lot and have to be very performant or that,

by vaer-k 8y ago

> Ruby was optimized for the developer, not for running it in production," says Sid. "For the things that get hit a lot and have to be very performant or that, for example, have to wait very long on a system IO, we rewrite those in Go Since they prefer the language patterns of Ruby but want better performance for concurrent processes, it seems like this would be a perfect use case for Elixir with Phoenix. I wonder if they considered it.

tschellenbach 8y ago
quite a big gap between Elixir & Go though for most use cases.
- dpeck 8y ago
  I don't disagree, but Im curious of the ones you're referring to
  - wrestlerman 8y ago
    Not OP, but I've been interested in both technologies for a while. Elixir with Phoenix feels like modern RoR, so it's probably best suited for startups that want to build their products fast and want to scale easily and cheaper. IMO Go is perfect for big companies and somewhat middle companies where they have some heavy traffic that needs to be addressed. I guess Golang is also easier to start with and craft something very fast as opposed to Elixir. (You can check multiple topics on elixirforum.com where people ask why their first-iteration code is slower than that in ruby/python.) I can be wrong, but I haven't found any golang opinioned-matured web framework, because most of the community is okay with building from the ground up. This may suggest that golang would be preferable in complex/enterprise systems? I'd choose Elixir for something that has to be done fast and be reliable and open for a lot of modifications that can be introduced without sweating. My point of view is based on building some simple product in Elixir and doing research. Also, a previous company I worked for had Golang and Ruby stack.
- cutety 8y ago
  Would you be able to give an example or two where you would reach for go vs elixir and vice-versa? I’ve tinkered with Go, and while it was fairly enjoyable to work with on the small scale, but the lack of generics and constant err != nil checks, and Go 2 on the horizon, I decided to hold off on building anything non-trivial with it. I’m currently rewriting a Rails app into smaller elixir components, the Rails app is mostly consists of several potentially long running processes that gathers large amounts of data from various sources, does some light transformations, and then combines it and outputs it in various forms. Elixir has been immensely more pleasurable to write in, as OTP, along with things like GenStage and Flow, seem like a perfect fit for this task. And, while go’s channels are cool, they don’t seem nearly as powerful as elixirs actor model/OTP — at least for this example. The one advantage of Go I can immediately think of is using it for some networking heavy app, which is an area Elixir/Erlang has room for improvement, as making some simple outside http requests isn’t nearly as dead simple, iirc.
  - chimen 8y ago
    Sure, here's a few, personal opinions: - Some programmers don't like functional programming (I'm not one of them) - Go has static typing and I find it really cuts away bugs - Go is backed by giants and has the horse power to push forward regardless of "Github stars" - Go is easy to compile and run on most/many platforms - I find myself more able to understand third party code As a web developer, would I use Go as opposed to Phoenix/Elixir? Yes, I am actually using it in production on a fairly big project [1]. I tried Phoenix and I found it "weird" for my liking. The authentication part of a web app was a real deal-braker for me = too complicated to implement (not bad, just too complicated). I'm the type of guy that brainstorms (90% of my projects are always "close to completion" though) a lot of ideas and wants to go up and running really fast. I can't do that with Python/Elixir/Ruby without many tests written because I don't trust the code/myself all that much. Where would I use Elixir/Phoenix: - a chat/support app or anything that relies heavily on websockets - real-time apps (related to first point) - apps that rely heavily on distributed tasks [1] https://typely.com https://typely.com
  - orwin 8y ago
    I wrote a small supervisord ripoff in go just after its launch, it was at the same time frustrating and enjoyable. I will have a week off in less than a month, do you think i should build a similar elixir app just to learn the language? Or do you have any idea of a better well known programm to build to "learn" the language in a week?
dragonwriter 8y ago
> Since they prefer the language patterns of Ruby but want better performance for concurrent processes, it seems like this would be a perfect use case for Elixir with Phoenix. Elixir does not have the language patterns of Ruby, though it has a deceptive visual similarity.
mbesto 8y ago
> language patterns of Ruby but want better performance for concurrent processes But then take on the disadvantages of acquiring talent and less adopted programming paradigms (e.g. functional programming)? Elixir/Phoenix is awesome, but it's not a panacea for everything. Language/framework choices aren't done in a vacuum.
- _asummers 8y ago
  We've had good success teaching team members with no FP or Elixir experience and training them to be productive Elixir developers. It takes investment, but so does having an employee.
inferiorhuman 8y ago
> Since they prefer the language patterns of Ruby but want better performance for concurrent processes, it seems like this would be a perfect use case for Elixir with Phoenix. I wonder if they considered it. The difference being that the Rails ecosystem is infinitely more mature than the Phoenix ecosystem (and community). Ecto is still going through some massive changes (ActiveRecord is comparatively stable). Personally I think that Elixr is an interesting language but it's not one I'd want to mess with in a production environment. The big win for Go is that it compiles down to a single binary. Ruby you get a single point of entry (script with a shebang). But Elixr/Phoenix? You get a handful of bash (not even POSIX sh!) scripts and binaries and a whole VM to deploy. As a BSD user, I gave up on Elixr/Phoenix after trying to debug the nightmarish deployments that had been broken for months. I couldn't tell if it was an issue in the rat's nest of bash scripts or a VM bug. Sure, ruby-bcrypt is broken on FreeBSD too with a similar head-in-sand mentality from the bcrypt gem maintainer (which could make Rails deployments a non-starter) but that's easy to fix and has been fixed out-of-band. Elixr? Well there's one maintainer for the deployment tool and he's stopped responding to bug reports of any sort. That said, I like Rails. A lot. But ruby is painfully slow and I've learned to push as much logic into the database as possible. So there's a compelling case to be made for an alternative. Unfortunately I've never had any other language give me that much trouble as Elixr has. Personally, I detest Go dependency and build management (and the Google involvement), but the simplicity of concurrency and deployment combined with the breadth of the standard library make a very compelling case for Go IMO. Hell, I would reach for Clojure before Elixr because at least then you're dealing with the comparatively mature Java VM. Personally I've gone down the Rust road, but even then I'm not sure I'd want to deploy a Rust web app in production just yet (although I really do like Rocket).
- pdimitar 8y ago
  > The difference being that the Rails ecosystem is infinitely more mature than the Phoenix ecosystem (and community) What are you viewing as mature? It's a loaded word and many people use it with a different meaning in mind. > Ecto is still going through some massive changes (ActiveRecord is comparatively stable) As of the latest release of Ecto -- 3.0 -- the maintainers said they consider it mostly complete and said they will not do breaking API changes [0]; this part in particular: "With the release of Ecto 3.0, I would like to announce that I finally consider Ecto to provide a stable API. This means no more new features, although we will continue providing bug fixes and updates. For everyone running Ecto in production, rest assured that Ecto will continue to be a well maintained project with the same production quality and polish that it has today." So the first part of your statement is factually false. For ActiveRecord being stable... subjective, I'll give you this much. Try and migrate a Rails 4.0 app to 5.x and come cry with me over a dozen beers. ;) > Personally I think that Elixr is an interesting language but it's not one I'd want to mess with in a production environment. Many people and organizations are "messing" with Elixir in production with great -- and increasing -- success. Phoenix at the moment is one of the very few frameworks that delay your scalability problems much farther into the future than most me and many others have worked with. Phoenix can easily give you thousands of requests per second on a $5 DigitalOcean droplet. Rails and several C# and Java frameworks cannot. I am not attacking you and I hope I don't sound that way -- but you seem to have a non-factually supported negative bias against Elixir. It gets more mature by the day and is quite capable of very serious work in pretty tough environments. Positive case studies spring into existence often. [0] https://elixirforum.com/t/ecto-3-0-is-out-and-stable-api/17306 https://elixirforum.com/t/ecto-3-0-is-out-and-stable-api/173...
sytse 8y ago
We are watching Elixir closely ever since visiting Krakow, Poland for the Railsberry conference in 2013. This is also where my co-founder Dmitriy and I first met in real life. As for the reasoning please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18973348 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18973348

by vaer-k 8y ago

tschellenbach 8y ago

quite a big gap between Elixir & Go though for most use cases.

dpeck 8y ago
I don't disagree, but Im curious of the ones you're referring to
- wrestlerman 8y ago
  Not OP, but I've been interested in both technologies for a while. Elixir with Phoenix feels like modern RoR, so it's probably best suited for startups that want to build their products fast and want to scale easily and cheaper. IMO Go is perfect for big companies and somewhat middle companies where they have some heavy traffic that needs to be addressed. I guess Golang is also easier to start with and craft something very fast as opposed to Elixir. (You can check multiple topics on elixirforum.com where people ask why their first-iteration code is slower than that in ruby/python.) I can be wrong, but I haven't found any golang opinioned-matured web framework, because most of the community is okay with building from the ground up. This may suggest that golang would be preferable in complex/enterprise systems? I'd choose Elixir for something that has to be done fast and be reliable and open for a lot of modifications that can be introduced without sweating. My point of view is based on building some simple product in Elixir and doing research. Also, a previous company I worked for had Golang and Ruby stack.
cutety 8y ago
Would you be able to give an example or two where you would reach for go vs elixir and vice-versa? I’ve tinkered with Go, and while it was fairly enjoyable to work with on the small scale, but the lack of generics and constant err != nil checks, and Go 2 on the horizon, I decided to hold off on building anything non-trivial with it. I’m currently rewriting a Rails app into smaller elixir components, the Rails app is mostly consists of several potentially long running processes that gathers large amounts of data from various sources, does some light transformations, and then combines it and outputs it in various forms. Elixir has been immensely more pleasurable to write in, as OTP, along with things like GenStage and Flow, seem like a perfect fit for this task. And, while go’s channels are cool, they don’t seem nearly as powerful as elixirs actor model/OTP — at least for this example. The one advantage of Go I can immediately think of is using it for some networking heavy app, which is an area Elixir/Erlang has room for improvement, as making some simple outside http requests isn’t nearly as dead simple, iirc.
- chimen 8y ago
  Sure, here's a few, personal opinions: - Some programmers don't like functional programming (I'm not one of them) - Go has static typing and I find it really cuts away bugs - Go is backed by giants and has the horse power to push forward regardless of "Github stars" - Go is easy to compile and run on most/many platforms - I find myself more able to understand third party code As a web developer, would I use Go as opposed to Phoenix/Elixir? Yes, I am actually using it in production on a fairly big project [1]. I tried Phoenix and I found it "weird" for my liking. The authentication part of a web app was a real deal-braker for me = too complicated to implement (not bad, just too complicated). I'm the type of guy that brainstorms (90% of my projects are always "close to completion" though) a lot of ideas and wants to go up and running really fast. I can't do that with Python/Elixir/Ruby without many tests written because I don't trust the code/myself all that much. Where would I use Elixir/Phoenix: - a chat/support app or anything that relies heavily on websockets - real-time apps (related to first point) - apps that rely heavily on distributed tasks [1] https://typely.com https://typely.com
- orwin 8y ago
  I wrote a small supervisord ripoff in go just after its launch, it was at the same time frustrating and enjoyable. I will have a week off in less than a month, do you think i should build a similar elixir app just to learn the language? Or do you have any idea of a better well known programm to build to "learn" the language in a week?

dragonwriter 8y ago

> Since they prefer the language patterns of Ruby but want better performance for concurrent processes, it seems like this would be a perfect use case for Elixir with Phoenix. Elixir does not have the language patterns of Ruby, though it has a deceptive visual similarity.

mbesto 8y ago

> language patterns of Ruby but want better performance for concurrent processes But then take on the disadvantages of acquiring talent and less adopted programming paradigms (e.g. functional programming)? Elixir/Phoenix is awesome, but it's not a panacea for everything. Language/framework choices aren't done in a vacuum.

_asummers 8y ago
We've had good success teaching team members with no FP or Elixir experience and training them to be productive Elixir developers. It takes investment, but so does having an employee.

inferiorhuman 8y ago

> Since they prefer the language patterns of Ruby but want better performance for concurrent processes, it seems like this would be a perfect use case for Elixir with Phoenix. I wonder if they considered it. The difference being that the Rails ecosystem is infinitely more mature than the Phoenix ecosystem (and community). Ecto is still going through some massive changes (ActiveRecord is comparatively stable). Personally I think that Elixr is an interesting language but it's not one I'd want to mess with in a production environment. The big win for Go is that it compiles down to a single binary. Ruby you get a single point of entry (script with a shebang). But Elixr/Phoenix? You get a handful of bash (not even POSIX sh!) scripts and binaries and a whole VM to deploy. As a BSD user, I gave up on Elixr/Phoenix after trying to debug the nightmarish deployments that had been broken for months. I couldn't tell if it was an issue in the rat's nest of bash scripts or a VM bug. Sure, ruby-bcrypt is broken on FreeBSD too with a similar head-in-sand mentality from the bcrypt gem maintainer (which could make Rails deployments a non-starter) but that's easy to fix and has been fixed out-of-band. Elixr? Well there's one maintainer for the deployment tool and he's stopped responding to bug reports of any sort. That said, I like Rails. A lot. But ruby is painfully slow and I've learned to push as much logic into the database as possible. So there's a compelling case to be made for an alternative. Unfortunately I've never had any other language give me that much trouble as Elixr has. Personally, I detest Go dependency and build management (and the Google involvement), but the simplicity of concurrency and deployment combined with the breadth of the standard library make a very compelling case for Go IMO. Hell, I would reach for Clojure before Elixr because at least then you're dealing with the comparatively mature Java VM. Personally I've gone down the Rust road, but even then I'm not sure I'd want to deploy a Rust web app in production just yet (although I really do like Rocket).

pdimitar 8y ago
> The difference being that the Rails ecosystem is infinitely more mature than the Phoenix ecosystem (and community) What are you viewing as mature? It's a loaded word and many people use it with a different meaning in mind. > Ecto is still going through some massive changes (ActiveRecord is comparatively stable) As of the latest release of Ecto -- 3.0 -- the maintainers said they consider it mostly complete and said they will not do breaking API changes [0]; this part in particular: "With the release of Ecto 3.0, I would like to announce that I finally consider Ecto to provide a stable API. This means no more new features, although we will continue providing bug fixes and updates. For everyone running Ecto in production, rest assured that Ecto will continue to be a well maintained project with the same production quality and polish that it has today." So the first part of your statement is factually false. For ActiveRecord being stable... subjective, I'll give you this much. Try and migrate a Rails 4.0 app to 5.x and come cry with me over a dozen beers. ;) > Personally I think that Elixr is an interesting language but it's not one I'd want to mess with in a production environment. Many people and organizations are "messing" with Elixir in production with great -- and increasing -- success. Phoenix at the moment is one of the very few frameworks that delay your scalability problems much farther into the future than most me and many others have worked with. Phoenix can easily give you thousands of requests per second on a $5 DigitalOcean droplet. Rails and several C# and Java frameworks cannot. I am not attacking you and I hope I don't sound that way -- but you seem to have a non-factually supported negative bias against Elixir. It gets more mature by the day and is quite capable of very serious work in pretty tough environments. Positive case studies spring into existence often. [0] https://elixirforum.com/t/ecto-3-0-is-out-and-stable-api/17306 https://elixirforum.com/t/ecto-3-0-is-out-and-stable-api/173...

sytse 8y ago

We are watching Elixir closely ever since visiting Krakow, Poland for the Railsberry conference in 2013. This is also where my co-founder Dmitriy and I first met in real life. As for the reasoning please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18973348 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18973348