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I've been monitoring Elixir on HN for a while now, looks like an interesting direction to take. I wanted to know which direction Elixir is going to take? Will

I've been monitoring Elixir on HN for a while now, looks like an interesting direction to take. I wanted to know which direction Elixir is going to take? Will Elixir be mostly compatible enough with Ruby so that Rails can run directly off on Elixir? Is there a plan to change Rails enough to run on Elixir? How does the community feel about Elixir? I'm certainly interested in the concurrency aspects of Elixir (ie. no GIL) and everything else that Erlang has to offer. The developers of Elixir were core Rails developers so please forgive me if I'm getting the wrong impression here.

dragonwriter 12y ago
> I wanted to know which direction Elixir is going to take? Will Elixir be mostly compatible enough with Ruby so that Rails can run directly off on Elixir? Elixir is not even approximately compatible with Ruby, nor is it intended to be. It just has syntax that is very loosely reminiscent of Ruby. Someone might one day write a Rails-like framework for Elixir, but it will never be the same Rails that runs on Ruby. OTOH, if you want something no GIL that can run Rails, there is always JRuby.
jtwebman 12y ago
Rails is just one way to solve data problems. I don't see Rails being written in Elixir as it is not a functional way to solve that problem. Nothing against rails it is a good way to solve the problem in a modern object oriented way though Active Record has it's issues as well.
yellowapple 12y ago
> Will Elixir be mostly compatible enough with Ruby so that Rails can run directly off on Elixir? Most likely not. However, it might be possible to run Ruby programs in OTP-style supervision trees, thus managed by a supervisor written in Erlang or Elixir of LFE or some other BEAM-based language and thus made able to leverage some or all of the advantages of Erlang (a good potential proof-of-concept would be a replacement for Puma or Unicorn or Passenger - in other words, a Rack-compatible web server (or wrapper around an existing web server, like Cowboy) written in Elixir or Erlang or LFE or what have you). > Is there a plan to change Rails enough to run on Elixir? Also most likely not; most of the Rails community is currently heavily dependent on the Ruby ecosystem, and there's not really much of a point in changing that. That isn't to say that there's no place for Elixir in a Rails development framework; there are plenty of Rails shops that use Erlang for dispatching requests to Rails instances (I believe Github is one such shop). > How does the community feel about Elixir? The Elixir community obviously feels elated :) The Ruby/Rails crowd is a bit harder to read. I personally work for a Rails consultancy, and right now my coworkers don't seem universally interested in it quite yet. That may change in the future, though, especially as more folks realize the merits of using Elixir and Ruby side-by-side and more packages (whether from the Ruby side or the Elixir/Erlang side) are developed to allow easy communication between those two worlds. The Erlang community seems to be mildly positive about it. At least one of Erlang's original creators has expressed a modestly-positive opinion of Elixir's direction (with a particular excitement about Elixir's Clojure-inspired "|>" (pipe) operator - something that a lot of Elixirists seem to like using, myself included). There's some deviation from the more Erlangy ways of doing things, however, and it's not as mature as Erlang itself, so (from what I understand based on my observations of the Erlang community - particularly mailing lists and conference recordings/transcripts) there's still a bit of resistance there.

dragonwriter 12y ago

> I wanted to know which direction Elixir is going to take? Will Elixir be mostly compatible enough with Ruby so that Rails can run directly off on Elixir? Elixir is not even approximately compatible with Ruby, nor is it intended to be. It just has syntax that is very loosely reminiscent of Ruby. Someone might one day write a Rails-like framework for Elixir, but it will never be the same Rails that runs on Ruby. OTOH, if you want something no GIL that can run Rails, there is always JRuby.

jtwebman 12y ago

Rails is just one way to solve data problems. I don't see Rails being written in Elixir as it is not a functional way to solve that problem. Nothing against rails it is a good way to solve the problem in a modern object oriented way though Active Record has it's issues as well.

yellowapple 12y ago

> Will Elixir be mostly compatible enough with Ruby so that Rails can run directly off on Elixir? Most likely not. However, it might be possible to run Ruby programs in OTP-style supervision trees, thus managed by a supervisor written in Erlang or Elixir of LFE or some other BEAM-based language and thus made able to leverage some or all of the advantages of Erlang (a good potential proof-of-concept would be a replacement for Puma or Unicorn or Passenger - in other words, a Rack-compatible web server (or wrapper around an existing web server, like Cowboy) written in Elixir or Erlang or LFE or what have you). > Is there a plan to change Rails enough to run on Elixir? Also most likely not; most of the Rails community is currently heavily dependent on the Ruby ecosystem, and there's not really much of a point in changing that. That isn't to say that there's no place for Elixir in a Rails development framework; there are plenty of Rails shops that use Erlang for dispatching requests to Rails instances (I believe Github is one such shop). > How does the community feel about Elixir? The Elixir community obviously feels elated :) The Ruby/Rails crowd is a bit harder to read. I personally work for a Rails consultancy, and right now my coworkers don't seem universally interested in it quite yet. That may change in the future, though, especially as more folks realize the merits of using Elixir and Ruby side-by-side and more packages (whether from the Ruby side or the Elixir/Erlang side) are developed to allow easy communication between those two worlds. The Erlang community seems to be mildly positive about it. At least one of Erlang's original creators has expressed a modestly-positive opinion of Elixir's direction (with a particular excitement about Elixir's Clojure-inspired "|>" (pipe) operator - something that a lot of Elixirists seem to like using, myself included). There's some deviation from the more Erlangy ways of doing things, however, and it's not as mature as Erlang itself, so (from what I understand based on my observations of the Erlang community - particularly mailing lists and conference recordings/transcripts) there's still a bit of resistance there.