10 ms·

Social virtual spaces with Elixir at Mozilla

travisgriggs 5y ago
I can't speak for Phoenix (yet), but today, I wrote my first macro for Elixir. I think I know what I like about Elixir. At its heart, it is a very simple language. It's not afraid to have an API that manipulates its own AST. 3 element tuple for every kind of AST node. That fricking simple. It makes it super easy to reason about the code and rewrite/restructure it programatically. It's like an abstraction of the RISC vs CISC debates. A language built from a few simple consistent building blocks, or a massive amalgamation of corner case optimizations designed ad hoc for each situation as it arises? Years ago, I was a full on Smalltalk enthusiast/ninja. One of the coolest tools that ever existed in the Smalltalk world was the Refactoring Browser written by John Brant and Don Roberts. It blazed the trail and wrote the book in IDE driven code refactoring. In all of the IDEs I've used since outside of Smalltalk, I haven't seen a refactoring they didn't implement, and there were quite a few I've never seen outside of that environment. Which was interesting, because Smalltalk has no manifest typing (it's run time typed rather than compile time). I once asked John and Don if they were going to do the same tooling for for Java in Eclipse. It would have been the bomb in those days, and probably a great money maker. I theorized that some of the "fuzzier" parts of refactoring Smalltalk code would be easier because of Java's manifest typing. Don replied that he had thought that as well, and they had looked at it. But what they had found was that if there was a gain in having the types available, it was dramatically overpowered by the complexity of the Java AST (this was in the early days of Java too). The corner cases of trying to transmogrify code in a behavior retaining way just blew up combinatorially with all of the different corner cases. They looked at doing the same for Ruby eventually when it began gaining in popularity. Ruby, like Smalltalk, has no manifest types. But they found the same thing. At the time, there were 90+ different node types for a Ruby AST. And it was much more difficult. So all of this tale is just a long way of saying, I'm liking Elixir so far. It's fundamentals are strange and paradigm challenging for me. That will take some patience to surpass. But I believe that platforms built on fewer scalable parts, rather than lots of syntactic sugar and variant execution models (I'm looking at all you "hybrid" languages), are better in the long run and way more empowering.
spicybright 5y ago
Why floating torsos without limbs? Could they have designed something less creepy to talk to?
- LinusPrime 5y ago
  Limbs can be tricky to animate correctly in VR… I still get nightmares from some of the abominations I’ve seen in VR Chat.
- jayd16 5y ago
  Usually all you have is head position and hand position. You don't have torso tracking separate from head tracking and because of that doing elbow IK can be really hard. This style keeps you out of the uncanny valley. Although, the realistic torso shape might go a bit too far.
  - gfodor 5y ago
    Worth noting Hubs is more like Wordpress for social VR - the content is largely up to the user (to either adopt or create) - so the avatars in screenshots say less about some kind of universal art design choices than whatever specific setup the user was in.
    - astlouis44 5y ago
      How's Jel going, Greg?
      - gfodor 5y ago
        Figuring out what to do with it! :) https://twitter.com/gfodor/status/1400670444533936128 https://twitter.com/gfodor/status/1400670444533936128
- gfodor 5y ago
  Believe me, not creepy is harder than it seems, especially in VR.
- 5y ago
sergiomattei 5y ago
These frequent posts about Elixir are tempting me to give it another shot... But the last time I tried (weeks ago), it was a total pain. I could barely find documentation for the authentication packages I was trying for Phoenix and the docs I did find were usually outdated. Packages were unmaintained left and right and there's no official libraries for things like Stripe. It was a real shame because I seriously align with the ideology behind it. It just slows me downvand for that reason I can't use it.
- dudul 5y ago
  What auth packages were you trying? Documentation in the Elixir ecosystem is often excellent. The recommended auth library with Phoenix is now phx_gen_auth if it helps. As for Stripe, this looks pretty mature to me https://github.com/code-corps/stripity_stripe https://github.com/code-corps/stripity_stripe Definitely not a lot of "official" libs/clients in Elixir, companies aren't gonna spend a lot of resources maintaining that.
  - sergiomattei 5y ago
    My experience with phx_gen_auth was like this: 1. Install Phoenix, expect the command to be available because everyone is raving about it. 2. Missing command. 3. Dig through docs. 4. Pull the development branch of Phoenix because phx_gen_auth is only available there. 5. Run the generator within the Phoenix git repo because it won't allow me to run it elsewhere using a development version. 6. Use the generator. 7. Never figure things out because the phx_gen_auth command is barely documented and now I've got files everywhere that I don't understand. I tried implementing API authentication as well and while I got it working, it was less pleasant than my usual Django stack. Another example. The colossal amount of docs referring to a missing Phoenix plugin for Guardian that got removed in a random update made me scratch my head and spend an hour digging through their changelog and commits to figure out why my code wasn't working. The change was not documented at all. All in all, there were roadblocks every step of the way with poor docs and big undocumented breaking changes in libraries like Guardian. I want to love this thing but it made me so unproductive in the first couple weeks of using it for basic web/api development that I simply noped out.
pqb 5y ago
This submission is probably the first example of usage Phoenix Framework in big company that I know. I remember how many there were Elixir vs Go "battles" on HN in last three years but what I have noticed the Phoenix have worse traction and new adopters evangelizing it. That's sad, because I think Elixir and Phoenix Framework definitely is worth some attention.
- dudul 5y ago
  There are plenty of big companies using Elixir/Phoenix. Bleacher Report, Cars.com, Pinterest and many more.
  - enraged_camel 5y ago
    Discord uses Elixir too, I think?
    - bcrosby95 5y ago
      They use Elixir but not Phoenix.
- dnautics 5y ago
  I have heard pagerduty deploys their elixir microservices using a (very cut down) version of Phoenix. Somewhere they have a private "miniPhoenix" template that autogenerates everything for them. There are some big non-tech companies that you probably know that use elixir-phoenix, off the top of my head, PepsiCo, MBTA, BBC, PRX (of NPR/public radio fame).
  - ch4s3 5y ago
    You can roll out your own mini Phoenix with flags passed to mix phi.new
- ch4s3 5y ago
  We use it at Pepsi eConmerce for multiple teams. In fact all of our newer backend projects use it.
benatkin 5y ago
Mozilla licenses almost everything under the MPL, which seems to reduce interaction with other open source organizations. I wonder if it bothers them, or they're OK with it.
- dralley 5y ago
  I doubt that's the reason (and if it is, that's a shame, because MPL is a great license and one of my personal favorites). Most of Mozilla's code is on their internal mercurial server rather than GitHub. That feels like a larger reason.
syspec 5y ago
I really want to try elixir, but I need an IDE based debugger! I tried the IntelliJ plugin, but it did not work (would work once the disconnect when the first BP was hit) JetBrains if you're listening, please make an official app / plug-in! Pretty please - My other gripe is the state of abandoned packages
- raarts 5y ago
  I used that debugger three years ago and it worked fine. Remember I had to do something special to set it up though. Made a career change after that so can't help you now.
- ch4s3 5y ago
  You probably don’t need a debugger in elixir, based on my experience. You can drop into a process with iex.pry() or use the repl and get a lot of insight that way. You’re generally not dealing with state outside or GenServers which you can inspect if needed.
teeray 5y ago
I can't believe this has been around since 2018 and this is the first I've heard of it. I can think of a bunch of events over the past year where this would have been awesome to use. Shame that the marketing hasn't been better.
gfodor 5y ago
Hello, I'm sure Mozilla folks will be here too (I no longer work on Hubs) but I am quoted a few times in this article and happy to answer any questions I can!
- yetanothermonk 5y ago
  This might be an ill-formed question given not knowing the specifics of the source code, but do you think Phoenix LiveView can be used to manage state through websockets vs the JSON payloads described in the article?
  - gfodor 5y ago
    Sorry I don’t really know enough about LiveView to give a good answer. The protocol involved here is a fairly unsophisticated game networking protocol sending delta updates of object properties and transforms at 10Hz or so, and takes the approach of ownership transfer to orchestrate which packets are authoritative. If a reader who knows LiveView understands what I just wrote, they may be able to answer :) (the library for Hubs doing this is networked-aframe)
- gavanwilhite 5y ago
  Rock on Greg / Dom / John / all! Awesome seeing behind the scenes on all this.
princevegeta89 5y ago
I started dabbling with elixir in 2017. The platform is phenomenal in terms of performance and the preciseness you can write code with. The pains I've seen are - thinking everything in a "functional" way - ide support - the library ecosystem, though rich in selection, could use some more help. Functional thinking becomes easier the more time you spend on it. I've recently solved the ide part with VSCode and ElixirLS. I use Docker and I'm able to get all interpretation and dynamic compiling along with suggestions, warnings using the VSCode Remote Containers plug in. Overall, the platform seems to be growing and it is great to see big players taking some steps here.
- brainbag 5y ago
  Do you have a reference or repo somewhere for your Docker setup, please? Sounds excellent.
  - princevegeta89 5y ago
    I can upload it to github and share it with you! Let me ping back later in the day
    - brainbag 5y ago
      Did you happen to upload this?
      - princevegeta89 5y ago
        Sorry, I will share it with you tonight! thanks!
- toastal 5y ago
  Thinking in a “functional way” is an upside and preferred by some and often a best practice by many (functional core, imperative shell crowd, much of the JS community post-React, etc.). It’s definitely a skill to have.
fsiefken 5y ago
I'd like to run Hubs Cloud on premises (my own home), but it's currently only offered as Digital Ocean droplet and Amazon https://hubs.mozilla.com/docs/hubs-cloud-intro.html https://hubs.mozilla.com/docs/hubs-cloud-intro.html I found some repositories here and there but it's all dated. I wondered if there is a more recent reticulum docker and installation document I could re-use and found the links below. If anyone has other tips, installation flows/scripts or pointers, feel free to share. https://sophiadigitalart.com/setup-your-own-hubs-server/ https://sophiadigitalart.com/setup-your-own-hubs-server/ https://github.com/mozilla/hubs https://github.com/mozilla/hubs https://github.com/xr3ngine-archive/mozilla-hubs-docker https://github.com/xr3ngine-archive/mozilla-hubs-docker https://gitlab.nautilus.optiputer.net/ar-noc/mozilla-hubs-docker https://gitlab.nautilus.optiputer.net/ar-noc/mozilla-hubs-do...
- gfodor 5y ago
  There have been several attempts to try to dockerize the stack but none successful as far as I know. I did most of the work on packaging this so I’m not totally sure what is missing, but the droplet setup was close enough that I’m surprised nobody has cracked an all in one container image yet.

I can't speak for Phoenix (yet), but today, I wrote my first macro for Elixir. I think I know what I like about Elixir. At its heart, it is a very simple language. It's not afraid to have an API that manipulates its own AST. 3 element tuple for every kind of AST node. That fricking simple. It makes it super easy to reason about the code and rewrite/restructure it programatically. It's like an abstraction of the RISC vs CISC debates. A language built from a few simple consistent building blocks, or a massive amalgamation of corner case optimizations designed ad hoc for each situation as it arises? Years ago, I was a full on Smalltalk enthusiast/ninja. One of the coolest tools that ever existed in the Smalltalk world was the Refactoring Browser written by John Brant and Don Roberts. It blazed the trail and wrote the book in IDE driven code refactoring. In all of the IDEs I've used since outside of Smalltalk, I haven't seen a refactoring they didn't implement, and there were quite a few I've never seen outside of that environment. Which was interesting, because Smalltalk has no manifest typing (it's run time typed rather than compile time). I once asked John and Don if they were going to do the same tooling for for Java in Eclipse. It would have been the bomb in those days, and probably a great money maker. I theorized that some of the "fuzzier" parts of refactoring Smalltalk code would be easier because of Java's manifest typing. Don replied that he had thought that as well, and they had looked at it. But what they had found was that if there was a gain in having the types available, it was dramatically overpowered by the complexity of the Java AST (this was in the early days of Java too). The corner cases of trying to transmogrify code in a behavior retaining way just blew up combinatorially with all of the different corner cases. They looked at doing the same for Ruby eventually when it began gaining in popularity. Ruby, like Smalltalk, has no manifest types. But they found the same thing. At the time, there were 90+ different node types for a Ruby AST. And it was much more difficult. So all of this tale is just a long way of saying, I'm liking Elixir so far. It's fundamentals are strange and paradigm challenging for me. That will take some patience to surpass. But I believe that platforms built on fewer scalable parts, rather than lots of syntactic sugar and variant execution models (I'm looking at all you "hybrid" languages), are better in the long run and way more empowering.

spicybright 5y ago

Why floating torsos without limbs? Could they have designed something less creepy to talk to?

LinusPrime 5y ago
Limbs can be tricky to animate correctly in VR… I still get nightmares from some of the abominations I’ve seen in VR Chat.
jayd16 5y ago
Usually all you have is head position and hand position. You don't have torso tracking separate from head tracking and because of that doing elbow IK can be really hard. This style keeps you out of the uncanny valley. Although, the realistic torso shape might go a bit too far.
- gfodor 5y ago
  Worth noting Hubs is more like Wordpress for social VR - the content is largely up to the user (to either adopt or create) - so the avatars in screenshots say less about some kind of universal art design choices than whatever specific setup the user was in.
  - astlouis44 5y ago
    How's Jel going, Greg?
    - gfodor 5y ago
      Figuring out what to do with it! :) https://twitter.com/gfodor/status/1400670444533936128 https://twitter.com/gfodor/status/1400670444533936128
gfodor 5y ago
Believe me, not creepy is harder than it seems, especially in VR.
5y ago

sergiomattei 5y ago

These frequent posts about Elixir are tempting me to give it another shot... But the last time I tried (weeks ago), it was a total pain. I could barely find documentation for the authentication packages I was trying for Phoenix and the docs I did find were usually outdated. Packages were unmaintained left and right and there's no official libraries for things like Stripe. It was a real shame because I seriously align with the ideology behind it. It just slows me downvand for that reason I can't use it.

dudul 5y ago
What auth packages were you trying? Documentation in the Elixir ecosystem is often excellent. The recommended auth library with Phoenix is now phx_gen_auth if it helps. As for Stripe, this looks pretty mature to me https://github.com/code-corps/stripity_stripe https://github.com/code-corps/stripity_stripe Definitely not a lot of "official" libs/clients in Elixir, companies aren't gonna spend a lot of resources maintaining that.
- sergiomattei 5y ago
  My experience with phx_gen_auth was like this: 1. Install Phoenix, expect the command to be available because everyone is raving about it. 2. Missing command. 3. Dig through docs. 4. Pull the development branch of Phoenix because phx_gen_auth is only available there. 5. Run the generator within the Phoenix git repo because it won't allow me to run it elsewhere using a development version. 6. Use the generator. 7. Never figure things out because the phx_gen_auth command is barely documented and now I've got files everywhere that I don't understand. I tried implementing API authentication as well and while I got it working, it was less pleasant than my usual Django stack. Another example. The colossal amount of docs referring to a missing Phoenix plugin for Guardian that got removed in a random update made me scratch my head and spend an hour digging through their changelog and commits to figure out why my code wasn't working. The change was not documented at all. All in all, there were roadblocks every step of the way with poor docs and big undocumented breaking changes in libraries like Guardian. I want to love this thing but it made me so unproductive in the first couple weeks of using it for basic web/api development that I simply noped out.

pqb 5y ago

This submission is probably the first example of usage Phoenix Framework in big company that I know. I remember how many there were Elixir vs Go "battles" on HN in last three years but what I have noticed the Phoenix have worse traction and new adopters evangelizing it. That's sad, because I think Elixir and Phoenix Framework definitely is worth some attention.

dudul 5y ago
There are plenty of big companies using Elixir/Phoenix. Bleacher Report, Cars.com, Pinterest and many more.
- enraged_camel 5y ago
  Discord uses Elixir too, I think?
  - bcrosby95 5y ago
    They use Elixir but not Phoenix.
dnautics 5y ago
I have heard pagerduty deploys their elixir microservices using a (very cut down) version of Phoenix. Somewhere they have a private "miniPhoenix" template that autogenerates everything for them. There are some big non-tech companies that you probably know that use elixir-phoenix, off the top of my head, PepsiCo, MBTA, BBC, PRX (of NPR/public radio fame).
- ch4s3 5y ago
  You can roll out your own mini Phoenix with flags passed to mix phi.new
ch4s3 5y ago
We use it at Pepsi eConmerce for multiple teams. In fact all of our newer backend projects use it.

benatkin 5y ago

Mozilla licenses almost everything under the MPL, which seems to reduce interaction with other open source organizations. I wonder if it bothers them, or they're OK with it.

dralley 5y ago
I doubt that's the reason (and if it is, that's a shame, because MPL is a great license and one of my personal favorites). Most of Mozilla's code is on their internal mercurial server rather than GitHub. That feels like a larger reason.

syspec 5y ago

I really want to try elixir, but I need an IDE based debugger! I tried the IntelliJ plugin, but it did not work (would work once the disconnect when the first BP was hit) JetBrains if you're listening, please make an official app / plug-in! Pretty please - My other gripe is the state of abandoned packages

raarts 5y ago
I used that debugger three years ago and it worked fine. Remember I had to do something special to set it up though. Made a career change after that so can't help you now.
ch4s3 5y ago
You probably don’t need a debugger in elixir, based on my experience. You can drop into a process with iex.pry() or use the repl and get a lot of insight that way. You’re generally not dealing with state outside or GenServers which you can inspect if needed.

teeray 5y ago

I can't believe this has been around since 2018 and this is the first I've heard of it. I can think of a bunch of events over the past year where this would have been awesome to use. Shame that the marketing hasn't been better.

gfodor 5y ago

Hello, I'm sure Mozilla folks will be here too (I no longer work on Hubs) but I am quoted a few times in this article and happy to answer any questions I can!

yetanothermonk 5y ago
This might be an ill-formed question given not knowing the specifics of the source code, but do you think Phoenix LiveView can be used to manage state through websockets vs the JSON payloads described in the article?
- gfodor 5y ago
  Sorry I don’t really know enough about LiveView to give a good answer. The protocol involved here is a fairly unsophisticated game networking protocol sending delta updates of object properties and transforms at 10Hz or so, and takes the approach of ownership transfer to orchestrate which packets are authoritative. If a reader who knows LiveView understands what I just wrote, they may be able to answer :) (the library for Hubs doing this is networked-aframe)
gavanwilhite 5y ago
Rock on Greg / Dom / John / all! Awesome seeing behind the scenes on all this.

princevegeta89 5y ago

I started dabbling with elixir in 2017. The platform is phenomenal in terms of performance and the preciseness you can write code with. The pains I've seen are - thinking everything in a "functional" way - ide support - the library ecosystem, though rich in selection, could use some more help. Functional thinking becomes easier the more time you spend on it. I've recently solved the ide part with VSCode and ElixirLS. I use Docker and I'm able to get all interpretation and dynamic compiling along with suggestions, warnings using the VSCode Remote Containers plug in. Overall, the platform seems to be growing and it is great to see big players taking some steps here.

brainbag 5y ago
Do you have a reference or repo somewhere for your Docker setup, please? Sounds excellent.
- princevegeta89 5y ago
  I can upload it to github and share it with you! Let me ping back later in the day
  - brainbag 5y ago
    Did you happen to upload this?
    - princevegeta89 5y ago
      Sorry, I will share it with you tonight! thanks!
toastal 5y ago
Thinking in a “functional way” is an upside and preferred by some and often a best practice by many (functional core, imperative shell crowd, much of the JS community post-React, etc.). It’s definitely a skill to have.

fsiefken 5y ago

I'd like to run Hubs Cloud on premises (my own home), but it's currently only offered as Digital Ocean droplet and Amazon https://hubs.mozilla.com/docs/hubs-cloud-intro.html https://hubs.mozilla.com/docs/hubs-cloud-intro.html I found some repositories here and there but it's all dated. I wondered if there is a more recent reticulum docker and installation document I could re-use and found the links below. If anyone has other tips, installation flows/scripts or pointers, feel free to share. https://sophiadigitalart.com/setup-your-own-hubs-server/ https://sophiadigitalart.com/setup-your-own-hubs-server/ https://github.com/mozilla/hubs https://github.com/mozilla/hubs https://github.com/xr3ngine-archive/mozilla-hubs-docker https://github.com/xr3ngine-archive/mozilla-hubs-docker https://gitlab.nautilus.optiputer.net/ar-noc/mozilla-hubs-docker https://gitlab.nautilus.optiputer.net/ar-noc/mozilla-hubs-do...

gfodor 5y ago
There have been several attempts to try to dockerize the stack but none successful as far as I know. I did most of the work on packaging this so I’m not totally sure what is missing, but the droplet setup was close enough that I’m surprised nobody has cracked an all in one container image yet.