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Not OP, but have used Elixir pretty extensively; the major selling points for me are the friendlier syntax and more active community support, plus with rebar3 +
by superhawk610 7y ago
Not OP, but have used Elixir pretty extensively; the major selling points for me are the friendlier syntax and more active community support, plus with rebar3 + Elixir's seamless Erlang interop you really don't give up anything, you can use any existing Erlang/Elixir libraries with a single syntax. It's pretty great.
- alskdj21 7y agoHaven't touched Erlang but has an entry level knowledge on Elixir. I often heard how easy it is to write macros on Elixir. Can you elaborate on this?
- arjan_sch 7y agoOne of the big differences between Erlang and Elixir is indeed that Elixir allows you to write macros in the language itself, using quote / unquote constructs just like lisps. This makes it easy to generate code on compile time, which is then executed in runtime without any performance penalty. A large part of Elixir itself is actually implemented as macros. For instance, the "unless" construct: defmacro unless(condition, do: do_clause, else: else_clause) do quote do if(unquote(condition), do: unquote(else_clause), else: unquote(do_clause)) end end (code simplified for clarity)
- fcbrooklyn 7y agoAnd the if-else construct is also a macro. The whole thing ends up being a case I think.
- dnautics 7y agoImho You shouldn't really write macros, they are there for libraries to make it easy to do the right thing with less boilerplate.