4 ms·

We will continue to use beam/otp where it makes sense. In fact some rust runs in BEAM now thanks to Rustler. We wrote a blog about this! https://blog.discord.c

by jhgg 6y ago

We will continue to use beam/otp where it makes sense. In fact some rust runs in BEAM now thanks to Rustler. We wrote a blog about this! https://blog.discord.com/using-rust-to-scale-elixir-for-11-million-concurrent-users-c6f19fc029d3 https://blog.discord.com/using-rust-to-scale-elixir-for-11-m...

Thaxll 6y ago
You said that Go doesn't have: algebraic data types, enums, borrow checker, and compile time memory management/safety which Erlang / Elixir is even worse in some of those because it's a dynamic typed language so it's a bit confusing.
- jhgg 6y ago
  I think you're missing the point. We use Elixir to solve one class of problems which its excellent in doing (notably: real time distributed systems.) In this area, there is nothing even remotely close in terms of capability. So, we choose the runtime over the language (elixir is a pretty cool dynamic language though!). Also, due to the unique nature of Erlang/Elixir, a lot of problems that exist in C/C++/Rust/Go don't exist in that language. Of course this has meant writing a lot more tests to test things that a typechecker should be able to catch. But it is what it is. We're following Gleam though to see where that ends up. BTW, here's some places I've spoken about Discord's Elixir usage: - a podcast: https://smartlogic.io/podcast/elixir-wizards/s5e8-nowack-heinz/ https://smartlogic.io/podcast/elixir-wizards/s5e8-nowack-hei... - interview with José Valim (elixir's creator): https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2020/10/08/real-time-communication-at-scale-with-elixir-at-discord/ https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2020/10/08/real-time-communicat...
  - jaytaylor 6y ago
    Gleam looks like a very promising language! I hadn't seen it before. https://gleam.run/book/tour/try.html https://gleam.run/book/tour/try.html It also looks like there are currently some serious limitations: https://github.com/gleam-lang/otp https://github.com/gleam-lang/otp
- c-cube 6y ago
  I think a difference is that Elixir is deliberately dynamically typed, so you don't expect type safety. You write the happy path and rely on "fail fast" and the actor hierarchies to write robust code. Besides, Elixir/Erlang has the best dynamically-typed equivalent of algebraic types (tuples + atoms + pattern matching) :-)

by jhgg 6y ago

Thaxll 6y ago

You said that Go doesn't have: algebraic data types, enums, borrow checker, and compile time memory management/safety which Erlang / Elixir is even worse in some of those because it's a dynamic typed language so it's a bit confusing.

jhgg 6y ago
I think you're missing the point. We use Elixir to solve one class of problems which its excellent in doing (notably: real time distributed systems.) In this area, there is nothing even remotely close in terms of capability. So, we choose the runtime over the language (elixir is a pretty cool dynamic language though!). Also, due to the unique nature of Erlang/Elixir, a lot of problems that exist in C/C++/Rust/Go don't exist in that language. Of course this has meant writing a lot more tests to test things that a typechecker should be able to catch. But it is what it is. We're following Gleam though to see where that ends up. BTW, here's some places I've spoken about Discord's Elixir usage: - a podcast: https://smartlogic.io/podcast/elixir-wizards/s5e8-nowack-heinz/ https://smartlogic.io/podcast/elixir-wizards/s5e8-nowack-hei... - interview with José Valim (elixir's creator): https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2020/10/08/real-time-communication-at-scale-with-elixir-at-discord/ https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2020/10/08/real-time-communicat...
- jaytaylor 6y ago
  Gleam looks like a very promising language! I hadn't seen it before. https://gleam.run/book/tour/try.html https://gleam.run/book/tour/try.html It also looks like there are currently some serious limitations: https://github.com/gleam-lang/otp https://github.com/gleam-lang/otp
c-cube 6y ago
I think a difference is that Elixir is deliberately dynamically typed, so you don't expect type safety. You write the happy path and rely on "fail fast" and the actor hierarchies to write robust code. Besides, Elixir/Erlang has the best dynamically-typed equivalent of algebraic types (tuples + atoms + pattern matching) :-)