Ask HN: Are you satisfied with Elixir or do you regret choosing Elixir?

Outstanding work from the Elixir team. Very good community in the forum.

It’s winter of elixir land. The hype cycle has died. If I have to start a project I will think twice unless it really needs distributed system.

My personal opinion - talent pool, plugins and ecosystem is kind of stagnated. First talent pool is really limited and not readily available. Very few companies use elixir in production. More hobbyists in the community than people who actually use it.

Hex has a lot of plugins which are not updated from long. For many there won’t be a plug-in. You have to write it from scratch.

In Phoenix, they are reinventing magic with LiveView.

Few guys who do elixir consulting gain most from the ecosystem.

As a developer if I have to invest my time learning a new language, I would choose rust or Go.

As a company if I have to start a project, I will check whether I have a requirement of distributed systems.

PS: I have used elixir for past 5 years in production.

We chose elixir in 2016 for our product and never regretted it.

Apart from application bugs we’ve caused, it just keeps chugging along and working beautifully. It’s never once been the bottleneck in our stack.

Finding people has not been tough at our scale, and they’ve been good quality.

We are just scratching the surface with OTP. And between that and the data processing tools, we know we can handle pretty much any scale.

Deployment is nearly as crude as it was 5 years ago though. We use distillery and edeliver. We are moving to docker containers soon.

We use Exq for background jobs and have processed 75 million in a year without a sweat (most of that in the last two months). We handle 55 million requests per month on t3.mediums. We are looking to switch from Exq to Oban but I’m nervous about whether Oban’s Postgres based architecture will handle it. It’ll probably be totally fine.

I've had an niche event ticketing Elixir/Phoenix app in production for 4 years and have had next to zero problems. It gets very bursty traffic (100s of simultaneous users when an event opens for ticket purchases with load quickly tapering off in a negative exponential distribution) and the load average barely changes with insanely fast responses on a $10 VM.

I think the only downside for me is having to squint sideways to figure out how to convert a complex SQL query into Ecto. I've been writing SQL for almost 30 years and I find myself dropping into using Ecto's `fragment` too often. I've been meaning to pickup "Programming Ecto" to educate myself more (https://pragprog.com/titles/wmecto/programming-ecto/).

I've done my share of RoR apps too and the nice thing about Elixir is there is very little magic and what magic there is (mostly via macros and code auto added via a `use` statement) can be seen and changed directly in your code instead of being hidden in some gem somewhere.

You will enjoy OTP and Beam, But you will miss Ruby plug-ins.

Very satisfied with elixir and the ecosystem is growing! There are some performance concerns if you're doing a large amount of list or string manipulations but these are somewhat special cases and I tend to reach out to a Rust NIF to handle them which resolves the problem.