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Munksgaard | 9 months ago

As someone who has used both SML, Haskell, Rust and Elixir professionally: No, not really.

Access to the BEAM is nice, but unless you're targeting the BEAM in your compiler I don't see any benefit. Even if you're targeting the BEAM, you might decide to use another language, cf. Gleam: https://github.com/gleam-lang/gleam/

Edit: Actually, one thing I will mention is the superior support in Elixir/Erlang for pattern matching bitstrings[0]. Not usually helpful in compilers, but an evolution of pattern matching that other languages should take up, in my opinion.

0: https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/Kernel.SpecialForms.html#%3C%3C%3E...

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Rendello|9 months ago

Erlang's bitstring/binary handling is one of those things that once you use, you'll wonder why it's not in every language (alongside, for me, Rust's enum/sum types and Python's badly-named but wonderfully useful while-else).