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Hard to say, as you pointed out, Whatapp runs on Erlang, and despite their upstream patches, no BEAM based framework is competitive on the techempower benchmark

Hard to say, as you pointed out, Whatapp runs on Erlang, and despite their upstream patches, no BEAM based framework is competitive on the techempower benchmarks. But let's not forget, AWS SimpleDB was written in Erlang, as well as the first iteration of Facebook Messenger. I invested a decent amount of time in learning Elixir and Erlang and understanding BEAM. My personal takeaway, which seems to be mirrored by every big company, is that the ecosystem just isn't worth the investment.

brightball 5y ago
Techempower benchmarks don’t really tell the story, especially if you look into the code being used. Besides, Django, Rails, Laravel, etc are awful in those same benchmarks but adoption is fine. The selling points of Erlang/Elixir are far more than simply non-real world benchmarks.
josevalim 5y ago
> as well as the first iteration of Facebook Messenger I was told, from someone familiar with the project at the time, that the first iteration was done with ejabberd, which is written in Erlang, with the main purpose of bootstrapping it. Erlang was not really in consideration in the long term at the time. Not sure if it changes your take personally but hopefully adding some context helps. I am always glad to be corrected if wrong. :) I wrote about Techempower in the past. In a nutshell, the Erlang runtime does plenty of assumptions that you would absolutely use in production but which become overhead in benchmarks like these. Previous comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22894191 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22894191 > My personal takeaway, which seems to be mirrored by every big company, is that the ecosystem just isn't worth the investment. Your experience was guided by a decent amount of time and I actually appreciate you invested in learning it before deciding it wasn't worth it. However, I doubt every big company had the same takeaway for two reasons: 1. I doubt every big company went through the same experience (i.e. have they learned about the ecosystem?) to mirror the takeaway 2. The every quantifier is provably false, since there is Facebook/Whatsapp, PepsiCo, Klarna, Ericsson, Nokia, Mozilla, Cisco, and others using the ecosystem in production and/or investing on it (plus at least another company from FAANG using it at multiple projects)
- h0l0cube 5y ago
  I feel like developer experience of Discord is the only argument you need when talking about whether Elixir can scale economically. If a company can do it on venture capital, it's well within the grasp of FANMAG. https://blog.discord.com/scaling-elixir-f9b8e1e7c29b?gi=ecb585c9c580 https://blog.discord.com/scaling-elixir-f9b8e1e7c29b?gi=ecb5... Edit: That said, squeezing every last drop of performance out of a server by writing everything in Rust is something that a FANMAG can well afford and may make more sense at the 100mil+ concurrent users scale, but it wouldn't be economical to start a project this way without certainty the capacity would be used.
quaunaut 5y ago
It's worth calling out that the TechEmpower benchmarks have been flawed as long as they've had Erlang/Elixir on them. People keep submitting changes and they keep refusing to implement them.
- brightball 5y ago
  Honestly, that feels like it’s worthy of a blog post at this point.

brightball 5y ago

Techempower benchmarks don’t really tell the story, especially if you look into the code being used. Besides, Django, Rails, Laravel, etc are awful in those same benchmarks but adoption is fine. The selling points of Erlang/Elixir are far more than simply non-real world benchmarks.

josevalim 5y ago

> as well as the first iteration of Facebook Messenger I was told, from someone familiar with the project at the time, that the first iteration was done with ejabberd, which is written in Erlang, with the main purpose of bootstrapping it. Erlang was not really in consideration in the long term at the time. Not sure if it changes your take personally but hopefully adding some context helps. I am always glad to be corrected if wrong. :) I wrote about Techempower in the past. In a nutshell, the Erlang runtime does plenty of assumptions that you would absolutely use in production but which become overhead in benchmarks like these. Previous comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22894191 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22894191 > My personal takeaway, which seems to be mirrored by every big company, is that the ecosystem just isn't worth the investment. Your experience was guided by a decent amount of time and I actually appreciate you invested in learning it before deciding it wasn't worth it. However, I doubt every big company had the same takeaway for two reasons: 1. I doubt every big company went through the same experience (i.e. have they learned about the ecosystem?) to mirror the takeaway 2. The every quantifier is provably false, since there is Facebook/Whatsapp, PepsiCo, Klarna, Ericsson, Nokia, Mozilla, Cisco, and others using the ecosystem in production and/or investing on it (plus at least another company from FAANG using it at multiple projects)

h0l0cube 5y ago
I feel like developer experience of Discord is the only argument you need when talking about whether Elixir can scale economically. If a company can do it on venture capital, it's well within the grasp of FANMAG. https://blog.discord.com/scaling-elixir-f9b8e1e7c29b?gi=ecb585c9c580 https://blog.discord.com/scaling-elixir-f9b8e1e7c29b?gi=ecb5... Edit: That said, squeezing every last drop of performance out of a server by writing everything in Rust is something that a FANMAG can well afford and may make more sense at the 100mil+ concurrent users scale, but it wouldn't be economical to start a project this way without certainty the capacity would be used.

quaunaut 5y ago

It's worth calling out that the TechEmpower benchmarks have been flawed as long as they've had Erlang/Elixir on them. People keep submitting changes and they keep refusing to implement them.

brightball 5y ago
Honestly, that feels like it’s worthy of a blog post at this point.