Show HN: WeUseElixir - Elixir project directory

[taddgiles]

WeUseElixir is a curated directory of apps, libraries and companies that use the Elixir programming language.

A few years ago I was introduced to Elixir. It was the first functional programming language I'd ever used. I became a huge fan of the language and the community.

I've now used Elixir in a variety of different projects both professional and personal. It's become my go-to language for building web applications. It is just fun to work with.

I created WeUseElixir as a way to increase awareness of the Elixir language and how it's being used. WeUseElixir provides a place for creators to share their projects and allows others to discover new and interesting projects.

[mig4ng]

I use it for many side projects, and I am starting to use it for bigger ones too.

Should we submit personal projects and smaller side projects, or is this for fully fledged app only?

Also, should we add know open source applications such as Plausible[1]?

I am always happy to see Elixir and Erlang hit the front page.

[1] - https://github.com/plausible/analytics

[bglusman]

Nice! There’s also this[0] project run by community /elixir-school[1] maintainers [0]https://elixir-companies.com/en [1]https://elixirschool.com/en

[taddgiles]

A big thank you to everyone for the interest, the suggestions and for the many submissions. Thank you!

[ch4s3]

How do I get in touch to correct the tech stack on one of these?

[pixelmonkey]

I just did a small programming side project with a friend in Elixir and I was pretty impressed with the language, especially how it approaches functional programming, concurrency, parallelism, and “programming in the large” (e.g. networked systems and clusters).

I still think there’d be some sort of mental hurdle for me to consider using it for a project of the kinds described on WeUseElixir (vs my go-to language of Python).

But simply toying around with a concrete example of a concrete “word count” program scaled up to multi-core and multi-node made me “get” Elixir a lot more.

Also, I highly recommend this podcast interview with the author of “Elixir in Action.” He does a really nice job describing what makes Erlang and Elixir unique vs other commonly used backend programming languages.

https://se-radio.net/2018/08/se-radio-336-sasa-juric-on-elix...

[itissid]

Have you tried the codecrafters exercises, you can build a shell and a redis cache in it. It's not even that hard when you have a nice planned laid out like they do

[kylecazar]

Cool -- I've suspected Elixir is used in many more companies than it's "famously" used in. A quick survey on Indeed somewhat confirms that.

Big fan, of both the language and community.

[sorentwo]

This is absolutely true.

I can confirm, from firsthand knowledge, that Elixir is used at dozens of Fortune 500 companies in the US.

[garbthetill]

yep, its always funny to come across a company that uses it. For me the latest one was tubi, ive heard truth social also uses it not 100% sure. Sometimes I wonder if they're quiet about elixir praise is because the technology just works with very little to no issues

[jamauro]

You can add:

ElectricSQL Supabase Felt

There’s another list here: https://elixir-companies.com

[taddgiles]

Thx for the tips!

[recroad]

Elixir is fantastic. Liveview is a huge productivity multiplier - lot of boilerplate disappears.

[andrewflnr]

LiveView is fun, but my problem is that in practice I often want local-first state. Is there a good way to do that with LiveView, maybe a clean way to write the little javascript snippets so they work with local state?

[shomp]

Right now I'm using Elixir to build an open-source nonprofit tech company, I will have to remember to add it to this project directory once we launch. Cool idea, keep up the good work. As a nonprofit tech company keeping costs low matters a lot, and Erlang/Elixir on BEAM makes it very easy to have tons of concurrent users with minimal overhead. Server start time is very fast. Coming from other functional languages like Clojure helps, but is not a requirement for getting started quickly.

[mmaia]

A suggestion for addition:

> Plausible Analytics is a standard Elixir/Phoenix application backed by a PostgreSQL database for general data and a Clickhouse database for stats.

https://github.com/plausible/analytics

[taddgiles]

Will do, thx for the idea!

[tommypalm]

This is a great idea. I'd like to make a few suggestions though:

- Allow filtering by companies and libraries. I'm interested in both, but I wanted to look at just the list of companies to see if there were any I didn't recognise.

- Adding a company seems to be just adding _your_ app. It would be good to suggest companies to be listed as long as you have some evidence that they use Elixir. I know that Apple has Elixir in their Environmental team, but I'm not sure how I would go about adding that.

- Move the category filtering to the directory page. It would be more interesting to see the whole list at once and filter by category.

[taddgiles]

Great suggestions! Thank you for taking to the time to share those.

[desireco42]

I have a digital studio that needs to find good companies to pitch them my services... just searching LI is not very helpful, this is way better.

Also, as a place that uses Elixir... I can find all the new tools and cool projects without watching endless videos on Youtubes... As I want to spend most of my time working on projects, not trying to catch up.

I think this is excellent, thank you for making it in this format.

[taddgiles]

Thx! Glad you're finding it useful!

[fbn79]

I never used Erlang, and I'm a functional programming fan. But languages based on heavy VM that abstract OS away always make me doubt that's the right direction.

[andrewflnr]

That's not a crazy instinct, and maybe if OSs were better you would even be right, but there's not really another way to get a skrillion communicating processes that can all crash/fail independently. Without a dedicated VM, all the other approaches are either less safe or too inefficient.

I consider BEAM an indication of a direction that OSs could and maybe should move. It's even possible to run BEAM on bare metal, (almost?) entirely in place of the normal OS.

[cess11]

What makes you think the BEAM VM is "heavy"?

It's almost like an OS in itself and initially designed to be like a more capable and robust OS on top of rather constrained computers. In my experience it's trivial to shell or port out to the environment when I want to, and I also see people that I don't think of as highly skilled low-level programmers do things with NIF:s so that can't be exceptionally demanding either.

[k__]

Half-OT: When would you use Elixir, when Erlang, and when Gleam?

I know relatively new projects that started with Erlang, despite Elixir being available and stable for years now.

[cess11]

Erlang is leaner and more elegant than Elixir. If you don't need the bells and whistles of Phoenix and Ash and so on, and your team is senior enough to just go with the syntax, then Erlang is a good option. Especially if you're doing sophisticated network plumbing and distributed processing stuff but not much direct interfacing with non-technical users.

Gleam takes inspiration from Elm, so if that's your thing and something you'd consider using, probably go with that rather than Phoenix. Again, if your team can handle it.

Personally I build web interfaces and so on as well as plumbing stuff and I'm also very fond of the one language through the entire stack experience it allows, so I mostly stick to Elixir. Prototyping in REPL, moving to scripts, and then into proper modules in the more stable projects. It also has a very nice code generation 'story' that allows a lot of nice shortcuts and sophisticated tools.

[nenenejej]

Oh Elixir is still niche then :)

(For any sufficiently popular language it would not be possible or interesting to curate such a list)

[didip]

Why not just make it a yaml document in a git repo instead of making users register?

[taddgiles]

That's worth considering. Avoiding the user registration would certainly be nice.

[_kidlike]

IIRC, Kagi is written in Elixir

[flexagoon]

No, it's written in Crystal

https://crystal-lang.org/