4 ms·

I think it’s odd that elixir doesn’t get more love. It ticks a lot of boxes that folks here get excited about, has a great ecosystem and tooling, BEAM is great,

I think it’s odd that elixir doesn’t get more love. It ticks a lot of boxes that folks here get excited about, has a great ecosystem and tooling, BEAM is great, and it’s much more syntactically familiar than erlang to my eye. I know of a couple companies aside from the perennial goto examples that built sizable saas products backed by it.

skybrian 1y ago
What does deployment look like? Can you get a static binary easily like with Go?
- crdrost 1y ago
  You don't get it from language tooling because you are compiling to a bytecode that runs in a virtual machine (BEAM). The current tool to wrap your bytecode with a VM so that it becomes standalone is Burrito[1], but there's some language support[2] (I think only for the arch that your CPU is currently running? contra Golang) and an older project called Distillery[3]. 1: https://github.com/burrito-elixir/burrito https://github.com/burrito-elixir/burrito 2: https://hexdocs.pm/mix/Mix.Tasks.Release.html https://hexdocs.pm/mix/Mix.Tasks.Release.html 3: https://hexdocs.pm/distillery/home.html https://hexdocs.pm/distillery/home.html
pluralmonad 1y ago
Elixir is good at managing complexity. I love flattening hierarchy and dealing with edge cases right in function definitions using pattern matching. Every other language without it just feels crippled after getting used to the feature.
cardanome 1y ago
The backend work I do is just super boring. I always wanted to learn Elixir but never had a project where it could show it strengths. Good old PHP works perfectly fine. Also corporations like their devs to be easily replaceable which is easier with more mainstream languages, so it is always hard for "newer" languages to gain traction. That said I am totally rooting for Elixir.
- DrewADesign 1y ago
  I think it’s great for boring stuff — the Phoenix web framework is really straightforward. Learning a whole new language paradigm and environment for a professional project you need to be productive in ASAP is definitely the worst kind of ‘not boring’ though. I know of a Haskell shop and everybody said they’d have a hell of a time finding people… but all them nerds were (and are) tripping over themselves to work there because they love Haskell… though some I’ve talked to ended up not liking Haskell in production after working there. There seems to be a similar dynamic, if a bit less extreme, in Elixir shops.
lenkite 1y ago
The BEAM VM executing bytecode is slower than a compiled binary. Sure, it is great when compared to Python and other interpreted languages. Not so much when you need fast processing and raw CPU performance. It also loses out to the JVM in performance, but wins in memory consumption.
- DrewADesign 1y ago
  But how many things involve fulfilling basic requests over a network pulling information from a database? Most things just don’t need that kind of performance.
  - lenkite 1y ago
    Sure for basic, dead CRUD, the choice of middleware language rarely makes any difference. But even bog-standard business processes eventually find the need for data-processing, crypto and parsing - the use-cases where people code Elixir NIF's. That is why for example you have projects like html5ever_elixir for parsing HTML/XML. Another use case is crypto - you have NIF's for several crypto libraries. Data processing - there are NIF's for Rust polars.
    - DrewADesign 1y ago
      > Sure for basic, dead CRUD From a technical perspective, this is the overwhelming majority of what makes the Net happen. BEAM is great for that and many other things, like extremely reliable communication streams. Use the right tool for the job. Rust sucks for high-level systems automation but that doesn’t make it any less useful than bash. It’s all about about use cases and Elixir fits many common use cases nicely, while providing some nice-to-haves that people often ask for in other common web dev environments.
- dmpk2k 1y ago
  It is slower, but a big cause of the slowness is a lot of copying (immutable data structures and separate heaps for every process). Nowadays the BEAM has a JIT. If you use type guards correctly the performance can be surprisingly good. Not C/C++/Rust/Go/Java good, but not too far off either. This is definitely a corner-case though.

skybrian 1y ago

What does deployment look like? Can you get a static binary easily like with Go?

crdrost 1y ago
You don't get it from language tooling because you are compiling to a bytecode that runs in a virtual machine (BEAM). The current tool to wrap your bytecode with a VM so that it becomes standalone is Burrito[1], but there's some language support[2] (I think only for the arch that your CPU is currently running? contra Golang) and an older project called Distillery[3]. 1: https://github.com/burrito-elixir/burrito https://github.com/burrito-elixir/burrito 2: https://hexdocs.pm/mix/Mix.Tasks.Release.html https://hexdocs.pm/mix/Mix.Tasks.Release.html 3: https://hexdocs.pm/distillery/home.html https://hexdocs.pm/distillery/home.html

pluralmonad 1y ago

Elixir is good at managing complexity. I love flattening hierarchy and dealing with edge cases right in function definitions using pattern matching. Every other language without it just feels crippled after getting used to the feature.

cardanome 1y ago

The backend work I do is just super boring. I always wanted to learn Elixir but never had a project where it could show it strengths. Good old PHP works perfectly fine. Also corporations like their devs to be easily replaceable which is easier with more mainstream languages, so it is always hard for "newer" languages to gain traction. That said I am totally rooting for Elixir.

DrewADesign 1y ago
I think it’s great for boring stuff — the Phoenix web framework is really straightforward. Learning a whole new language paradigm and environment for a professional project you need to be productive in ASAP is definitely the worst kind of ‘not boring’ though. I know of a Haskell shop and everybody said they’d have a hell of a time finding people… but all them nerds were (and are) tripping over themselves to work there because they love Haskell… though some I’ve talked to ended up not liking Haskell in production after working there. There seems to be a similar dynamic, if a bit less extreme, in Elixir shops.

lenkite 1y ago

The BEAM VM executing bytecode is slower than a compiled binary. Sure, it is great when compared to Python and other interpreted languages. Not so much when you need fast processing and raw CPU performance. It also loses out to the JVM in performance, but wins in memory consumption.

DrewADesign 1y ago
But how many things involve fulfilling basic requests over a network pulling information from a database? Most things just don’t need that kind of performance.
- lenkite 1y ago
  Sure for basic, dead CRUD, the choice of middleware language rarely makes any difference. But even bog-standard business processes eventually find the need for data-processing, crypto and parsing - the use-cases where people code Elixir NIF's. That is why for example you have projects like html5ever_elixir for parsing HTML/XML. Another use case is crypto - you have NIF's for several crypto libraries. Data processing - there are NIF's for Rust polars.
  - DrewADesign 1y ago
    > Sure for basic, dead CRUD From a technical perspective, this is the overwhelming majority of what makes the Net happen. BEAM is great for that and many other things, like extremely reliable communication streams. Use the right tool for the job. Rust sucks for high-level systems automation but that doesn’t make it any less useful than bash. It’s all about about use cases and Elixir fits many common use cases nicely, while providing some nice-to-haves that people often ask for in other common web dev environments.
dmpk2k 1y ago
It is slower, but a big cause of the slowness is a lot of copying (immutable data structures and separate heaps for every process). Nowadays the BEAM has a JIT. If you use type guards correctly the performance can be surprisingly good. Not C/C++/Rust/Go/Java good, but not too far off either. This is definitely a corner-case though.