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Elixir-lang.org has a new design
- bbg2401 3mo agoAlso observed here: https://elixirforum.com/t/elixir-lang-org-redesign/76041 https://elixirforum.com/t/elixir-lang-org-redesign/76041
- allanmacgregor 3mo agoLooks pretty good, I like that they are highlighting the potential uses for elixir.
- grahac 3mo agoThis is great! Now waiting for the forum UI update too! :) Hoping Elixir continues to thrive. It is such a great language (and such a great language for AI coding too!)
- Stromgren 3mo agoIn fact it came out as the absolute best in a comparison by Tencent (1). See table 4. It’s more than a year old though. 1. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.09101 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.09101
- alberth 3mo agoElixir is great. OT: I wish more funding & development effort went into BEAM itself on making it more performant. Note: I’m not talking concurrency. I’m talking pure raw performance. Seems like it’s been a one person show for over a decade on making it faster.
- ch4s3 3mo agoIt’s pretty hard to make things like math faster for real world use cases in a bytecode interpreter.
- dmpk2k 3mo agoIt's a JIT nowadays. Admittedly an extremely simple one, to minimize compile times and maintenance overhead. You can get substantial performance improvements by using guards though. See what Wings3D does with is_float() everywhere in hot numeric-heavy code.
- travisgriggs 3mo agoCan you elaborate why adding guards makes things faster?
- quasigloam 3mo agoPresumably it gives the JIT more type information, parent example was specifically about one of the type-check functions you can use for guards (is_float). While running it'll use the is_float information to generate code for the float case, and bail out if the actual values fail the guards at runtime. Other JITS like V8 will do things like speculative inlining and inserting its own type guards , but if this JIT is "Admittedly an extremely simple one" then it presumably doesn't do much of that.
- jimbokun 3mo agoJava and Javascript run times do really well at that.
- dnautics 3mo agoi ran a quick experiment where instead of doing boxing the way its done in the beam currently, i used a different boxing (NaN strategy and there was a 10x speedup
- josevalim 3mo agoThere are multiple people working on the JIT within the last 5-6 years. The WhatsApp folks also contribute meaningfully. I suspect once the Erlang/OTP team squeezes all performance in the JIT, they will look into optimizing across modules, which will probably open up many new possibilities, but it requires rethinking some runtime primitives.
- alberth 3mo agoHi Jose You’re an inspiration for many. Thank you. I’m curious to know what your top 3 hopes for BEAM itself are for the coming years (in any area that you think would make it better).
- josevalim 3mo agoThanks for the kind words and the nice question! 1. The cross module optimizations I mentioned above 2. Have a WASM target for the runtime itself 3. Make it easier to ship single file executables with the whole VM But they are really “nice-to-have”s. I have been a happy user for 15+ years!
- ashton314 3mo agoA few years ago, I was working on an interpreter implemented in elixir for a domain specific language. It was a pretty basic metacircular interpreter. It relied heavily on function signature dispatch. When I tried breaking up the massive “interpret” function across modules, performance tanked. I got it all back by using some macro shenanigans, but understandably the team did not like this. Knowing what I know now, I would’ve tried to push for a threaded interpreter to get rid of the runtime overhead of dispatching altogether. I don’t know if they’ve changed the architecture of that module much since I left :-)
- jeanlucas 3mo agoNice! The showcase of companies is really nice
- losvedir 3mo agoTo me, it seems one of the killer use cases for Elixir (/Erlang) is its distributed cluster capability. Does anyone have experience with that or case reports to share? I've used Elixir quite a bit professionally, but mostly as just a "nicer Rails" with horizontally scalable but otherwise independent Phoenix apps in your traditional Kubernetes setup, which seems to me to kind of missing out on its main purpose.
- davidw 3mo agoElixir/Erlang works very well in a semi-embedded environment where you need a higher level command and control component that behaves in a deterministic way and is pretty robust. I was involved, years ago, in using Erlang on these devices: https://www.icare-world.com/us/product/icare-eidon/ https://www.icare-world.com/us/product/icare-eidon/ It was a lot of fun and there were some very interesting challenges for everyone involved.
- org3 3mo agoI've worked a little bit with distributed Elixir using `Horde.DynamicSupervisor` on Kubernetes. Apparently there's other options like 'swarm' and DynamicSupervisor [1]. It'd be great for clear analysis of the benefits these kinds of abstractions bring vs non-BEAM approaches. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZmDEUeHeVI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZmDEUeHeVI
- jomcgi 3mo agoAlso interested in hearing about this! I built an elixir k8s control plane recently and kept expecting to reach for it but it never really made sense when it was controlling golang daemonsets. My usecase is less independent though, that control plane is orchestrating like Lambda/fly.io style workloads on top of firecracker: https://jomcgi.dev/ember https://jomcgi.dev/ember
- toast0 3mo agoIt's been a while, but I used to work at WhatsApp and we used Erlang distribution heavily. I understand the clusters have gotten really huge since I left. It's super handy. There's no security barrier between nodes. It's a headache if your network is unreliable. For a chat app, messaging someone becomes a series of steps: a) look up if they're online (send a message to the presence database service) b) if you got a process id back, that's the process connected to the user, so send it the message. The process could be on the same machine or not, but the sending api is the same. This is the special part: few other environments make arbitrary messaging between processes/threads/tasks/whathaveyou so pervasive. c) if you don't get a process id back, the user is offline; send the message to the offline database.
- 999900000999 3mo agoElixir is such an elegant language. I'm hoping to find a reason to use it soon.
- pluralmonad 3mo agoSuch a delight to use and the core team seems to always make the right decision.
- dnautics 3mo agoits been fun building a multiagent personal assistant. (wip, no guarantees, this is the engine i use) https://github.com/ityonemo/ce_ce https://github.com/ityonemo/ce_ce
- andruby 3mo agoReading the Erlang ProgProgrammers book by Joe Armstrong made me a better Ruby programmer as it changed my perspective on functional programming and abstractions. I first reached for Elixir when Ruby couldn't handle large amounts of websocket messages. It really shines in high-concurrency contexts. I also love Phoenix LiveView and have a couple of side-projects running on it.
- shevy-java 3mo agoI think most will agree that it improved on Erlang. For me as a long-term ruby user, though, elixir is not quite as elegant as it could or should have been. Even simple things such as "defmodule Xyz do" feels weird to me.
- CyberDildonics 3mo agoI'm hoping to find a reason to use it soon. Do you have a program that doesn't need to run fast?
- ipnon 3mo agoIt's a good joke but most of my applications are I/O bound. So I use Elixir for performance.
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- ModernMech 3mo ago[flagged]
- acedTrex 3mo agoIts pretty snappy/responsive for me at least so thats good. Normally LLM slop sites are pretty at first but sluggish as hell. So some level of skill went into this one.
- josevalim 3mo agoThe Software Mansion folks designed it and we actually iterated on the designs on Figma, having discussions as humans, and exploring alternatives. They were lovely to work with. I also worked on all of the copy myself, collecting feedback from core maintainers as I went. The new tagline was a suggestion from Theo which we iterated on. I did use LLMs as an assistant, but I did not ask it to generate the content. Might as well use LLMs for the whole thing next time, since we will be accused of doing so anyway! :D
- ModernMech 3mo agoShame then that despite all that, they landed on the same design used by every "I asked an LLM to make me a language and a website this weekend here's what it spit out" project. I mean, I'm not saying it looks bad or is a bad result. Just it's very similar to other things that have put in much less effort.
- pests 3mo ago"Human produces output similar to a machine trained on all human output"
- josevalim 3mo agoIt is funny (and perhaps a bit depressing) that LLMs were trained on our content and now, if we generate a similar structure as before, with the usual love and care, we will be criticized by it. Even when it does not "look bad or is a bad result".
- arikrahman 3mo agoI prefer https://jank-lang.org/ https://jank-lang.org/ new re-design, and the approach of a more step-wise refinement.
- __float 3mo agoHow is this language related to Elixir? Or are you just commenting that another language has a website?
- arikrahman 3mo agoThey had a recent re-design last week.
- Starlevel004 3mo agoWhy does it have like 0.1s animations?
- josevalim 3mo agoCan you clarify which ones? We will be glad to improve them (or feel free to send a PR).
- binaryturtle 3mo agoSite doesn't work for me (older Firefox). Looks like there's no CSS and some Javascript error (probably makes it bail out loading the CSS?)
- pwg 3mo agoIt also does not load if Javascript is blocked.
- sph 3mo agoNo mention of AI and LLM in the front page. Life is good.
- Onavo 3mo agoBut I bet the landing page was made with AI assistance.
- reliablereason 3mo agoIt certainly looks like a Claude design to some extent; not all they way however.
- bbg2401 3mo agoIt feels less sloppy than most obviously AI generated landing pages. The only sloppy aspects that stand out to me are the needless animations/transitions.
- sph 3mo agoIt was not: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48959936 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48959936
- vopi 3mo ago>I also worked on all of the copy myself, collecting feedback from core maintainers as I went. The new tagline was a suggestion from Theo which we iterated on. I did use LLMs as an assistant, but I did not ask it to generate the content. >Might as well use LLMs for the whole thing next time, since we will be accused of doing so anyway! :D
- eikenberry 3mo agoThey have a Machine Learning section on the front page. Just have to scroll down a bit, under the "Use Elixir for" section.
- nozzlegear 3mo ago
- asa400 3mo agoLooks great! There are some style quirks with cutoff elements in Firefox 152.0.6: https://imgur.com/a/OtnESi7 https://imgur.com/a/OtnESi7
- phplovesong 3mo agoI guess elixir is a nice lang for the niche of erlang. But its dynamic (the "type system" is really meh at best) its not suited for real world use. If i go full dynamic, why not use pure erlang instead?
- ch4s3 3mo agoHave you tried it since the new type system rolled out?
- phplovesong 3mo agoYes. It feel unergonomic and bolted on. I rather have a pure static type system, or a full dynamic language.
- pluralmonad 3mo agoMaybe try and build something and see for yourself? Saying elixir is not fit for real world use shows how little experience with it you have.
- phplovesong 3mo agoI tried it, and it brings little. It got new syntax, but syntax alone is not important. I can build with erlang, so why would i pick elixir? I used erlang for almost 20 years, and never saw the idea of elixir. Gleam on the other hand has a actual type system. It still young but i can see what it offers. So syntax for me is totally pointless and just noise.
- dnautics 3mo ago> not suited for real world use. I hope you don't use discord or rely on pagerduty.
- phplovesong 3mo agoDont use discord, never have. It could be just as easily be built in vanilla. Its just a chat really. Nothing special.
- loloquwowndueo 3mo agoThere’s no obvious way to switch to normal (aka “light”) mode. Dark mode is very difficult for some people (me included) to read. If you must default to dark mode that’s your choice but I’d love to see a light mode toggle somewhere prominent.
- madibo3156 3mo agoYeah. You'll notice that there's a mix of light and dark. Some segments are light-on-dark, then it switches to dark-on-light. It appears to me like a "design trend" that's at odds with accessibility. https://www.apple.com https://www.apple.com does this too.
- moomoo11 3mo agoi along with 99% of people don’t mind it
- recursivegirth 3mo agoThis, plus there is research that suggests dark mode does not help with retention of information.[1] I have started to slowly transition back to light mode for most of my work applications. (Email, Coding, etc.) Dark mode feels correct, but it is hostile. Now blue light on the other hand... you should get filters for your monitor/glasses. [1] https://www.nngroup.com/articles/dark-mode/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/dark-mode/
- nine_k 3mo agoDark mode is great if you want to have many distinct colors on the dark background, like syntax highlighting. For monochrome, light background and dark text work better.
- loloquwowndueo 3mo ago99% of people? Citation needed.
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- zuzululu 3mo agoI appreciate Elixir but the problem is the job market/talent pool is tiny compared to other existing languages. If you buy into the Elixir stack then you now have constraint you could've avoided entirely by avoiding it. Also for devs there seems to be no premium offered for this talent pool scarcity. With LLMs I think language-specialists are redundant in a large scheme of things. ex) at one of my current remote jobs, I shipped an entire telecom infrastructure with barely knowing Elixir and we brought on contractors to audit the code and they found no issues.
- toast0 3mo ago> appreciate Elixir but the problem is the job market/talent pool is tiny compared to other existing languages. > I shipped an entire telecom infrastructure with barely knowing Elixir and we brought on contractors to audit the code and they found no issues. Erlang/Elixir experience is rare, because it's not widely used and the teams are small. It's not worth trying to hire for it. Hire for people who can figure it out on the go (amd are willing to give it a try). You did it, hire other people who seem likely to be able to.
- zuzululu 3mo agoas a SWE this is not a good sign. it means the job market is slowly transitioning into temp work like economics. The value I got out of the Elixir contractors was immense since it not only proved that we can get a huge bulk of the work done without specialists and use them on demand for audit for a few months before AI this would've been not been possible. normal market dynamics suggest scarcity demand premiums but this is not the case with software developers it seems.
- toast0 3mo agoWell, a) did you pay your Elixir contractors more than you would pay a Java contractor for similar work? but also... b) scarcity isn't the only factor in price. Erlang/Elixir developers are scarce, but Erlang/Elixir jobs are also scarce. You need both demand and scarcity to raise prices. Also, it doesn't cost much to turn a willing, good developer into an Erlang/Elixir developer; substitute goods reduce the impact of scarcity. also c) if you found contractors, but not employees, maybe you weren't willing to pay enough... So maybe the price is higher than you thought?
- hybridcivic182 3mo agoJosé Valim & team have made such an incredible language and ecosystem. thank you for all the faithful work, especially the run up to 1.20 over this past year
- listic 3mo agoI heard from a fan of Erlang that Elixir was made by people who don't really understand Erlang who reworked it/BEAM to be in the style of Ruby; that made it popular even though it's an abomination. What do you think?
- radialstub 3mo agoJoe Armstrong, one of the creators of erlang: "Dave loves Elixir, I think it's pretty cool, I think we're going to have fun together."
- atonse 3mo agoA “fan” of erlang definitely gives me vibes if the 3-4 people at conferences who used to debate about Erlang and Haskell and all these things in very academic ways and enjoyed it. And that’s awesome. We need people like that. But the vast majority of people want to get stuff done, and I have always admired that Jose Valim seems to be one of those people that just “gets” the mix of good technology with its PRACTICAL use rather than just debating programming languages endlessly. Without elixir, outside of a handful of companies implementing it in their core systems, erlang probably would’ve mostly remained in the domain of the same guys at conferences that passionately debated tabs vs spaces or BDD vs TDD. In fact, I think that’s exactly where Haskell is. I barely hear about it, just like I used to barely hear about erlang. The rest of us that focus on what we’re building with the technology or the dev UX, etc, would’ve stuck to ruby and other things, if not for elixir. I say this as someone who has been writing elixir full time since early 2016 and absolutely love the beam. And I’ve yet to edit my first erlang file. It just hasn’t mattered in most of my real world use.
- vendiddy 3mo agoI don't think this is true. The history of Elixir has its roots in Jose learning Erlang, loving the properties BEAM, but wanting a different language. All of the principles of the BEAM still exist in Elixir. And a lot of the Elixir semantics come from Erlang, precisely because Jose studied Erlang and the BEAM.
- swingboy 3mo agoOn the first syntax example: there’s something funny to me about using three pipe operator and four different functions to turn “hello world” into “Hello World”.
- josevalim 3mo agoThat's a good point. It is meant to be an introductory example but I will see if I can come up with something else! Thanks! EDIT: shipped!
- tosti 3mo agoI followed the links to docs and getting started, but it says page not found. The URL: https://elixir.hexdocs.pm/getting-started.html https://elixir.hexdocs.pm/getting-started.html
- josevalim 3mo agoIt should be fixed soon (deploying now). Thank you!!!
- jolux 3mo agoLove the new site! Minor typo in the Erlang card: “Elixir also excels at IoT, distributed systems, and everything the Erlang is renowned for” should probably be “everything the Erlang VM is known for” or “everything Erlang is known for.”
- josevalim 3mo agoBoom! Fixed, thanks!
- aejm 3mo agoI think this version is an improvement over the old one! In particular how it highlights the packages in the ecosystem better.
- shevy-java 3mo agoLooks nice. But it would be more important to clean up elixir itself. So many things are unnecessary syntax-wise. At the least elixir made working with erlang easier, so they solved that part.
- stanmancan 3mo agoSuch as?
- SoftTalker 3mo agoI don't really have large monitors by today's standards, and the site looks nice enough but fully half of what I'm looking at is blank space. I don't remember what the old site looked like so don't know if that's really a change.
- khurs 3mo agoDidn't see the old one, so don't know whats changed. But it's blazing fast which is good to see.
- mattmatters 3mo agoThanks crew, looks great. Love how dedicated you all are to providing clear entrypoints and being thoughtful around documentation!
- AloysB 3mo agoNice re-design. I didn't mind the old one, but I understand that it helps adoption to keep the website shinier.
- asp_hornet 3mo agoI picked up Elixir this year. I’m gobsmacked on what the language and BEAM offer. Such a slept on ecosystem. I’m full convert. New site looks great.
- giancarlostoro 3mo agoOne of my favorite devs I love listening to talks from is Joe Armstrong and he had a blog post where he wrote a post about Elixir, and it was mostly positive, I feel like if he wasnt building Erlang he would have just became an Elixir developer. https://joearms.github.io/published/2013-05-31-a-week-with-elixir.html https://joearms.github.io/published/2013-05-31-a-week-with-e... RIP Joe Armstrong you were brilliant.
- Joel_Mckay 3mo agoErlang ran multi-billion dollar market cap telecom companies for decades. Elixir just made Erlang easier to learn, and yes they replace a lot of cluster bodges at scale. Does rapid cross-platform deployments with single code-base ease, and with Phoenix channels is very economical =3 https://quasar.dev/introduction-to-quasar/ https://quasar.dev/introduction-to-quasar/
- syspec 3mo agoI waited for an great editing expert before trying elixir, that never came... But, now with LLMs I don't have to fear a loosely typed language, I'd love to give it another go.
- nine_k 3mo agoYou can try Gleam instead (also on the front page today).
- aeonfox 3mo ago> loosely typed Minor nitpick: I believe Elixir and Erlang are strongly typed languages, but for a long time they have both been dynamically typed. With v1.20, Elixir is well on its way to transitioning to a gradually static typed language, and to-date has done so almost purely through inference (except for guards which can explicitly specify type information)
- SilentM68 3mo agoReally cool site redesign and great language :) The only thing I believe the language's missing is it's own dedicated IDE.
- josefrichter 3mo agoBEAM, the Elixir runtime, happens to be the perfect choice for agents and orchestration of multi-agent systems. I’ve written about it e.g. here https://josefrichter.design/blog/crowd https://josefrichter.design/blog/crowd