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emadb | 5 years ago

Actually Elixir and Erlang are at the same level: they both run on the BEAM. So you need to know the BEAM that it is like a virtual machine that act differently from what we are used to (JVM, .NET). Once you learn the BEAM everything become clear and easy to use. IMHO Process state isolation and message passing are the core, that's not so difficult to learn and apply.

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discordianfish|5 years ago

Yes, you need to learn the BEAM VM which makes it not easy to learn. It still might be worth it, but now you need to understand Elixir, Erlang, BEAM - additionally to your OS's API.

All I can offer are anecdotes but I've worked at one company with a sizeable rabbitmq cluster where we were fortunate enough to have a guy in a different team who was a BEAM maintainer in his free time. He was the only one able to debug issues (mostly around unexpected memory usage).

At another place, we had some in house elixir services. Developers were very happy and productive with it, but we also ran into unexpected memory usage and crashes due to that and to the day their root cause are unclear, even after adding detailed telemetry to monitor process counts and memory profiles.

I guess I have a general issue with VM based languages, but that might be due to the fact that I spend more time debugging issues than writing software and I appreciate the common libc/syscall api used in VM-less languages.

dnautics|5 years ago

> unexpected memory usage

Number one cause of hard-to-track memory usage in elixir, especially with services that parse JSON. Someone is ingesting JSON and caching a snippet of the JSON in an ets table, which means the entire JSON is never GC'd.

rantwasp|5 years ago

Elixir and Erlang are not at the same level.

Elixir compiles down to Erlang which is compiled down to BEAM code.