Elixir seems to be picking up insane steam right now. Every day or two there is a fascinating Elixir post here and its promise seems too good to resist. Has anyone else latched their cart onto this horse?
I built a fintech backend system using Eljxir a few years ago, and I loved it. However, I had to use Go and Python as a sort of escape hatch when companies offered massively time-saving SDKs in those languages but not Elixir. The ecosystem doesn’t seem to have really grown much since then. Looking around at the state of things, lots of important OSS packages have not been maintained, and that’s concerning. I absolutely love Elixir and the careful thought put into so much of the language and primary frameworks. However, I have become more skeptical that the actual ecosystem will hit critical mass. I really wish it would. I see a lot of articles on HN about Elixir, but my feeling is that it’s just more interesting than the constant stream of JS and Python we’ve had for decades now.
In my experience a lot of OSS elixir libraries are basically done. They get updated if the language changes, but otherwise they just do what they do well and they resist feature creep.
As someone active in the community I wouldn't say there has been any particularly massive ramp up recently.
Someone refernced ElixirConf US and some of the news-flow is certainly from that.
Elixir has been building a steady steam pressure for a long time and I think steady is still the case.
As someone writing about Elixir I will say that it has good traction here as a general rule. I think Erlang appeals to the CS-interested, Elixir appeals to a lot of Ruby and startup folks. The ecosystem also innovates a decent bit. I think it punches above its weight on the HN front page.
The company I started working for a few months ago wrote their whole web app with Elixir/Phoenix LiveView. It's been a real pleasure to work with after years of React and Next.js. The main thing I miss are types though.
We've been running a large web application backend written in Elixir for over three years now. It's awesome and we've also rewritten some of our microservices to utilize Distributed Erlang. No need for a service mesh this way. :-)
Been running our tech stack on Elixir for the last 3 years. I'm the owner of a small e-commerce company where I'm the only tech person (and also the ceo so I can only spend 20% of my time on tech).
Why I love it:
- The mental model just clicks for me. The syntax is really simple and the semantics are consistent. There is no abstraction. It's all about processing data.
- The REPL (IEX) is way more than a REPL. It's "you inside your running program". You can poke around your code, draft it, debug it, right there. You can fire it on prod to understand a bug. Or use LiveBook, think of it like the Elixir version of Jupyter notebooks that can connect to your application.
- Real life performance is great, not because of speed but because of concurrency.
- The whole developer experience is great. Mix (the build tool, dependency manager, etc.) is simple, awesome. Dependencies are really rarely an issue.
- It's rock solid. In 3 years, I never had one downtime.
- LiveView is a god send. Not having to switch language for UI work is amazing, performance is great, and it's server side HTML which is amazing for SEO. My website is 99 on lighthouse without any crazy work.
- You need heavy computation and performance on some parts? Use rust, via rustler.
- You need to scale to multiple servers? It is distributed. Already. Just make sure to not have anti-patterns in your code.
- But the real kicker it's in its power due to the OTP platform. I think it's quite complex to grasp how much it's powerful when you haven't experienced it. Need to batch insert statements or rate limit api calls to a 3rd party service who can only accept one call per second per channel? A working simple solution is only 20 lines of code. Need to launch many different workflows running concurrently, keeping their state, recovering when crashing? 100 lines.
The exciting developments:
- Elixir NX ecosystem (NX, Bumblebee, etc): running and training AI models directly in Elixir, in a distributed way.
- Liveview Native and Elixir Desktop: two big initiative to bring Elixir to Desktop and Mobile applications.
- Gradual Typesystem. Jose Valim, the creator of Elixir, is working on that right now. I really liked the approach of set-theoretic types and the pragmatism of the approach. Hopefully it will be released in the not too distant future.
The "to improve":
I have the feeling that the platform (OTP) being the killer app per se of Elixir, the whole marketing of the ecosystem if 100% targeted towards developers. Which is good in many ways. But for the ecosystem to grow I think more initiatives towards business-type applications would be welcome. By example, there is only a few payment gateways libraries existing which is for me a sign of the lack of business audience.
Conclusion:
Elixir made me a better developer, but most importantly a really productive one.
Some dumb questions: for liveview web / liveview native, is it possible to save rendered code offline and every time it connects to server , it will first check a defined version number ,if the version changes , it will update the code. If the the version is the same or if there is no internet connection, it will use stored code. Perhaps Elixi can be used this way for offline apps while maintaining the dynamic server rendering feature
This is very inspiring. I'm in a similar situation! I'm also the only tech person for a small ecomm company, I'm just not the owner :)
I obviously have lots of questions but biggest one that relates to other convos I had on HN recently: did you use an off-the-shelf ecomm solution or roll your own?
bicx|2 years ago
ch4s3|2 years ago
conradfr|2 years ago
I actually do small PRs to update deps etc on those kinds of repo and people are usually are OK to merge.
lawik|2 years ago
Someone refernced ElixirConf US and some of the news-flow is certainly from that.
Elixir has been building a steady steam pressure for a long time and I think steady is still the case.
As someone writing about Elixir I will say that it has good traction here as a general rule. I think Erlang appeals to the CS-interested, Elixir appeals to a lot of Ruby and startup folks. The ecosystem also innovates a decent bit. I think it punches above its weight on the HN front page.
It is a healthy ecosystem and seems to grow.
(edit: a spelling)
plondon514|2 years ago
actionfromafar|2 years ago
Or some Typescript style front for Elixir?
lkurusa|2 years ago
thibaut_barrere|2 years ago
Plenty of use-cases are made easy by the stack, from regular web work, API (https://transport.data.gouv.fr/swaggerui) to proxying (https://github.com/etalab/transport-site/tree/master/apps/un...) to real-time maps (https://transport.data.gouv.fr/explore), clustered maps (https://transport.data.gouv.fr/explore/gtfs-stops), XML queries building (https://transport.data.gouv.fr/tools/siri-querier?endpoint_u...)...
The maintenance story is very good too.
With ML being added (Nx/Axon etc), and mobile apps being in the works (LiveViewNative), it has become my everyday language & stack.
Arubis|2 years ago
anoy8888|2 years ago
julienmarie|2 years ago
Why I love it:
- The mental model just clicks for me. The syntax is really simple and the semantics are consistent. There is no abstraction. It's all about processing data.
- The REPL (IEX) is way more than a REPL. It's "you inside your running program". You can poke around your code, draft it, debug it, right there. You can fire it on prod to understand a bug. Or use LiveBook, think of it like the Elixir version of Jupyter notebooks that can connect to your application.
- Real life performance is great, not because of speed but because of concurrency.
- The whole developer experience is great. Mix (the build tool, dependency manager, etc.) is simple, awesome. Dependencies are really rarely an issue.
- It's rock solid. In 3 years, I never had one downtime.
- LiveView is a god send. Not having to switch language for UI work is amazing, performance is great, and it's server side HTML which is amazing for SEO. My website is 99 on lighthouse without any crazy work.
- You need heavy computation and performance on some parts? Use rust, via rustler.
- You need to scale to multiple servers? It is distributed. Already. Just make sure to not have anti-patterns in your code.
- But the real kicker it's in its power due to the OTP platform. I think it's quite complex to grasp how much it's powerful when you haven't experienced it. Need to batch insert statements or rate limit api calls to a 3rd party service who can only accept one call per second per channel? A working simple solution is only 20 lines of code. Need to launch many different workflows running concurrently, keeping their state, recovering when crashing? 100 lines.
The exciting developments:
- Elixir NX ecosystem (NX, Bumblebee, etc): running and training AI models directly in Elixir, in a distributed way.
- Liveview Native and Elixir Desktop: two big initiative to bring Elixir to Desktop and Mobile applications.
- Gradual Typesystem. Jose Valim, the creator of Elixir, is working on that right now. I really liked the approach of set-theoretic types and the pragmatism of the approach. Hopefully it will be released in the not too distant future.
The "to improve":
I have the feeling that the platform (OTP) being the killer app per se of Elixir, the whole marketing of the ecosystem if 100% targeted towards developers. Which is good in many ways. But for the ecosystem to grow I think more initiatives towards business-type applications would be welcome. By example, there is only a few payment gateways libraries existing which is for me a sign of the lack of business audience.
Conclusion: Elixir made me a better developer, but most importantly a really productive one.
anoy8888|2 years ago
sodapopcan|2 years ago
I obviously have lots of questions but biggest one that relates to other convos I had on HN recently: did you use an off-the-shelf ecomm solution or roll your own?
passion__desire|2 years ago
justusw|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
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