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Question to the former Rails devs out there: We mostly see threads fawn over Elixir and Phoenix, have you experienced any downsides to switching? Anything you

Question to the former Rails devs out there: We mostly see threads fawn over Elixir and Phoenix, have you experienced any downsides to switching? Anything you miss from Rails? I'm convinced to give it a try after that demo!

buf 7y ago
Also curious. I've been a django user for 5 years and a rails user for 9 years. I mostly use rails as an API these days and a React app for the front end.
- mercer 7y ago
  I'd say I sometimes miss Rails' ecosystem, but the many advantages of Phoenix and especially LiveView are worth that small downside. To someone who uses Rails/Django with React, I'd describe LiveView as something that offers pretty much everything you're used to, but with the React part consolidated with the server-side of things. I've been playing around with LiveView since it came out, and have been using it for 'serious' work for the past year or so, and I still regularly discover ways in which this setup simplifies things, makes development faster and more fun, and saves me from various potential security flaws or 'busiwork'. Imagine that your store (Redux, whatever) and view (React) ran in the same place as your backend. Direct access to the database and the rest of the backend, no need to carefully consider whether it's really worth it to increase your js payload with library x, no constant context switching, no building and maintaining of, essentially, two completely separate applications, no need to make sure your API endpoints are properly versioned, or that they don't expose data that shouldn't be exposed, or that they send only the data you need. Little to no need for rube-goldberg js pipelines, and significant less time spent dealing with synchronizing state between server and client. I'm probably forgetting some other advantages. There are some things where LiveView doesn't seem ideal, but I've found that even in those cases I prefer using LiveView wherever I can anyways, and then I do the specific javascripty bits wherever I need them.
itake 7y ago
It seems like a lot of companies are moving to Go for fast services. As a rails dev for 10+ years, I am looking at Go instead of Elixir and Phoenix, b/c Go is a much more popular language than Elixir.
- innocentoldguy 7y ago
  Go may be popular, but is also a lot less complete. Some other things to consider are that Go's concurrency model is quite bloated when compared to Elixir's, Go uses public memory for its goroutines vs. Elixir's private memory that protects processes, Go uses cooperative multitasking vs. Elixir's preemptive model, and Go's dependency handling is absolute rubbish. Elixir's process supervision is amazing and Elixir's pattern-matching allows you to write easier-to-read and more maintainable code, in my opinion. While both are good languages, I've personally found Elixir > Go.
  - donatzsky 7y ago
    Which would you say is easiest to learn, for someone with a little programming experience? I'm currently planning a SaaS project and had settled on go, but this discussion is making me wonder if perhaps Elixir is the better choice.
    - innocentoldguy 7y ago
      I think the basics of Elixir are easier to learn. The syntax is pretty straight forward and you don't have to worry about much more than functions and modules. OPT, which is how you build supervision trees and other more complex Elixery things, is tricky at first but reading through Designing Elixir Systems with OTP, by James Edward Gray & Bruce A. Tate, and The Little Elixir & OTP Guidebook, by Benjamin Tan Wei Hao should clear it up fairly well. This is highly subjective, of course, but I've written code in C, C++, Pascal, Basic, Python, Perl, Ruby, JavaScript, Go, PHP, Java, C#, Clojure, Scheme, Cobol, and Pick Basic (of all things). Elixir has been my most favorite language so far.
- aczerepinski 7y ago
scraplab 7y ago
There's so much to like about Elixir/Phoenix. The only real downside I've experienced is that there isn't the range of libraries available compared to Ruby/Rails. That said, many of the libraries that do exist are of a decent quality with good documentation, and easy to contribute to where you need to.
pg_bot 7y ago
I have ~6 years experience working in rails and ~3 years working with Phoenix. The only downsides I can think of are lack of official clients for APIs, and some missing packages. For example, if I wanted to do some PDF work I would really miss the prawn library. I don't miss anything from rails, Phoenix IMO is a superior web framework.
- strzibny 7y ago
  I agree. Luckily, sometimes the fix is easy. For example, I packaged my invoice PDF library[0] as a Docker container and simply created a small Elixir module that calls it. [0] https://github.com/strzibny/invoice_printer https://github.com/strzibny/invoice_printer

buf 7y ago

Also curious. I've been a django user for 5 years and a rails user for 9 years. I mostly use rails as an API these days and a React app for the front end.

mercer 7y ago
I'd say I sometimes miss Rails' ecosystem, but the many advantages of Phoenix and especially LiveView are worth that small downside. To someone who uses Rails/Django with React, I'd describe LiveView as something that offers pretty much everything you're used to, but with the React part consolidated with the server-side of things. I've been playing around with LiveView since it came out, and have been using it for 'serious' work for the past year or so, and I still regularly discover ways in which this setup simplifies things, makes development faster and more fun, and saves me from various potential security flaws or 'busiwork'. Imagine that your store (Redux, whatever) and view (React) ran in the same place as your backend. Direct access to the database and the rest of the backend, no need to carefully consider whether it's really worth it to increase your js payload with library x, no constant context switching, no building and maintaining of, essentially, two completely separate applications, no need to make sure your API endpoints are properly versioned, or that they don't expose data that shouldn't be exposed, or that they send only the data you need. Little to no need for rube-goldberg js pipelines, and significant less time spent dealing with synchronizing state between server and client. I'm probably forgetting some other advantages. There are some things where LiveView doesn't seem ideal, but I've found that even in those cases I prefer using LiveView wherever I can anyways, and then I do the specific javascripty bits wherever I need them.

itake 7y ago

It seems like a lot of companies are moving to Go for fast services. As a rails dev for 10+ years, I am looking at Go instead of Elixir and Phoenix, b/c Go is a much more popular language than Elixir.

innocentoldguy 7y ago
Go may be popular, but is also a lot less complete. Some other things to consider are that Go's concurrency model is quite bloated when compared to Elixir's, Go uses public memory for its goroutines vs. Elixir's private memory that protects processes, Go uses cooperative multitasking vs. Elixir's preemptive model, and Go's dependency handling is absolute rubbish. Elixir's process supervision is amazing and Elixir's pattern-matching allows you to write easier-to-read and more maintainable code, in my opinion. While both are good languages, I've personally found Elixir > Go.
- donatzsky 7y ago
  Which would you say is easiest to learn, for someone with a little programming experience? I'm currently planning a SaaS project and had settled on go, but this discussion is making me wonder if perhaps Elixir is the better choice.
  - innocentoldguy 7y ago
    I think the basics of Elixir are easier to learn. The syntax is pretty straight forward and you don't have to worry about much more than functions and modules. OPT, which is how you build supervision trees and other more complex Elixery things, is tricky at first but reading through Designing Elixir Systems with OTP, by James Edward Gray & Bruce A. Tate, and The Little Elixir & OTP Guidebook, by Benjamin Tan Wei Hao should clear it up fairly well. This is highly subjective, of course, but I've written code in C, C++, Pascal, Basic, Python, Perl, Ruby, JavaScript, Go, PHP, Java, C#, Clojure, Scheme, Cobol, and Pick Basic (of all things). Elixir has been my most favorite language so far.
aczerepinski 7y ago

scraplab 7y ago

There's so much to like about Elixir/Phoenix. The only real downside I've experienced is that there isn't the range of libraries available compared to Ruby/Rails. That said, many of the libraries that do exist are of a decent quality with good documentation, and easy to contribute to where you need to.

pg_bot 7y ago

I have ~6 years experience working in rails and ~3 years working with Phoenix. The only downsides I can think of are lack of official clients for APIs, and some missing packages. For example, if I wanted to do some PDF work I would really miss the prawn library. I don't miss anything from rails, Phoenix IMO is a superior web framework.

strzibny 7y ago
I agree. Luckily, sometimes the fix is easy. For example, I packaged my invoice PDF library[0] as a Docker container and simply created a small Elixir module that calls it. [0] https://github.com/strzibny/invoice_printer https://github.com/strzibny/invoice_printer