Any best practice guides for running Elixir in production? How do you handle deployments, hotfixes, multi-node scaling, etc. in an automated way?
Elixir v1.3 released
51–60 of 125 posts
Re: Elixir v1.3 released
#52Anyone here switched from a statically typed functional programming language (Haskel, OCaml, F#, Scala...) to Elixir? How would you describe the experience? What do you miss? What do you like/love? Overall, would you recommend taking that step?
I used to do Scala prior to coming to Elixir, mainly by using Play Framework to create web apps. I can tell you that I love Elixir and that I will not be going back to Scala. I miss nothing from Scala. * Pattern matching in Elixir is superior to Scala's in every way possible (You can pattern match on function parameters!!) * Async code is a breeze with Task.async()/Task.await() instead of mapping on Future's everywhe…
> * No more JVM!
You're just trading one VM for another, though. How does having a Beam VM environment differ from a JVM environment?
Re: Elixir v1.3 released
#53I've never really looked into Elixir. I'm a Python guy and readability is the first thing that makes me love or hate a new language. Considering I've always found Erlang fairly obtuse visually I am surprised by how easy on the eye Elixir is. I found this quote very telling: > "Elixir is simply the first language since Ruby to really care about code beauty and UX of the language, libraries and ecosystem." (found here:…
I started out learning Erlang before Elixr had really crossed my radar. I have to say I prefer the Erlang syntax to the ruby-inspired Elixir. Maybe just a matter of what you know, I could see a RoR developer finding Elixir more appealing (I've never really used Ruby or Rails at all).
I am primarily a C# developer who learned Erlang (and did some small stuff in it) then moved to Elixir (I have never programmed in Ruby).
I think the huge extent of macros in Elixir is used extremely dangerously, and it can be very difficult to truly know what's going on behind the scenes sometimes.
That being said, I still prefer Elixir to Erlang for 2 reasons really.
1) I have a very iterative development style which involves a lot of refactoring and test -> code -> test -> code cycles that kept getting extremely frustrating with the ant-turd line endings. Honestly, if I could not have to deal with those line endings I probably would be more inclined to Erlang over Elixir
2) The testing infrastructure seemed much easier to use in Elixir than Erlang.
That being said, I don't see a purpose for Elixir or Erlang in the web serving space, and instead are using it for distributed (and non) stateful servers.
Re: Elixir v1.3 released
#54Anyone here switched from a statically typed functional programming language (Haskel, OCaml, F#, Scala...) to Elixir? How would you describe the experience? What do you miss? What do you like/love? Overall, would you recommend taking that step?
I switched from Ruby to Scala, and I have had an absolute blast. Elixir is sort of chained to BEAM, which doesn't appear to have as bright a future as the JVM or LLVM does, so Scala seemed like a safer bet. Reading about Elixir is cool sometimes, but then I look at Dotty, and I feel confident that I made the correct choice. I've also been keeping an eye on Crystal (statically typed Ruby-esque language, LLVM), but the…
When you say BEAMs future is not as bright, what indicators are pointing you in that direction?
Re: Elixir v1.3 released
#55Anyone here switched from a statically typed functional programming language (Haskel, OCaml, F#, Scala...) to Elixir? How would you describe the experience? What do you miss? What do you like/love? Overall, would you recommend taking that step?
I used to do Scala prior to coming to Elixir, mainly by using Play Framework to create web apps. I can tell you that I love Elixir and that I will not be going back to Scala. I miss nothing from Scala. * Pattern matching in Elixir is superior to Scala's in every way possible (You can pattern match on function parameters!!) * Async code is a breeze with Task.async()/Task.await() instead of mapping on Future's everywhe…
I haven't tried Elixir yet, so I can't really compare on your points, but a couple notes:
You can use https://github.com/scala/async for async/await in Scala. It's super easy.
Also, you can pattern match function parameters in Scal using PartialFunction `case` syntax.
Re: Elixir v1.3 released
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
I started out learning Erlang before Elixr had really crossed my radar. I have to say I prefer the Erlang syntax to the ruby-inspired Elixir. Maybe just a matter of what you know, I could see a RoR developer finding Elixir more appealing (I've never really used Ruby or Rails at all).
Agreed. The syntax and benefits would certainly appeal if I were a Ruby developer, but coming from a different perspective, I don't get the reason for all the love.
What about the pipe operator in Elixir? Isn't it tedious and less readable to apply the same logic in Erlang?
Re: Elixir v1.3 released
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
I switched from Ruby to Scala, and I have had an absolute blast. Elixir is sort of chained to BEAM, which doesn't appear to have as bright a future as the JVM or LLVM does, so Scala seemed like a safer bet. Reading about Elixir is cool sometimes, but then I look at Dotty, and I feel confident that I made the correct choice. I've also been keeping an eye on Crystal (statically typed Ruby-esque language, LLVM), but the…
When you say BEAMs future is not as bright, what indicators are pointing you in that direction?
Relative to LLVM, I mean. I don't think there are any huge red flags with regards to BEAM.
Re: Elixir v1.3 released
#58Anyone here switched from a statically typed functional programming language (Haskel, OCaml, F#, Scala...) to Elixir? How would you describe the experience? What do you miss? What do you like/love? Overall, would you recommend taking that step?
I switched from Ruby to Scala, and I have had an absolute blast. Elixir is sort of chained to BEAM, which doesn't appear to have as bright a future as the JVM or LLVM does, so Scala seemed like a safer bet. Reading about Elixir is cool sometimes, but then I look at Dotty, and I feel confident that I made the correct choice. I've also been keeping an eye on Crystal (statically typed Ruby-esque language, LLVM), but the…
> Elixir is sort of chained to BEAM, which doesn't appear to have as bright a future as the JVM or LLVM does, so Scala seemed like a safer bet.
Where does this impression come from? The BEAM VM is maintained by Ericsson, we get new "major" releases every year. In the last years we got the maps data type, the new scalable timer API, better tracing facilities, dirty schedulers, and so on. Lately, at ElixirConf Berlin, we heard about the current efforts on scaling the Erlang Distribution to thousands of nodes out of the box (it is already possibly today, just not by default).
They are also plenty of research projects, mostly in Europe, about improving the VM, development experience and scalability in different ways, such as http://release-project.eu/, http://www.prowessproject.eu/ and http://paraphrase-ict.eu/. That's not including the usual suspects like Chalmers and Uppsala in Sweden, which have been exploring different aspects, specially in the testing area with property-based testing, concolic testing, systematic concurrent testing, etc.
Companies like Adapteva (behind Parallella), Basho, Erlang Solutions, Plataformatec, and many more are investing in the ecosystem too. If there is one thing I am not worried about is the VM and the runtime bright future.
In my opinion, the simple fact we have a runtime with preemptive light-weight processes from the ground-up (instead of tackled on top as a library/framework) with per process garbage collection and inter-node communication taken care of is enough to hold the VM for the next handful of years, even if all development ceased today.
Re: Elixir v1.3 released
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used to do Scala prior to coming to Elixir, mainly by using Play Framework to create web apps. I can tell you that I love Elixir and that I will not be going back to Scala. I miss nothing from Scala. * Pattern matching in Elixir is superior to Scala's in every way possible (You can pattern match on function parameters!!) * Async code is a breeze with Task.async()/Task.await() instead of mapping on Future's everywhe…
> * No more JVM! You're just trading one VM for another, though. How does having a Beam VM environment differ from a JVM environment?
True. That bullet was more of my opinion of disliking the memory usage the JVM uses as well as my personal preference of VM.
BEAM has many great advantages such as fault tolerance and multi-node distribution built in. This allows concurrency to be a first-class citizen for applications running on the BEAM. I'm not saying that concurrency can't be done on the JVM, but that I've found it to be much simpler using BEAM. On the other hand, the JVM excels at computational work compared to the BEAM. Both VMs have their place and can be better at different types of problems comparatively.
Re: Elixir v1.3 released
#60Any best practice guides for running Elixir in production? How do you handle deployments, hotfixes, multi-node scaling, etc. in an automated way?
This doesn't answer all of your questions, but it was the fastest way I found to get an Elixir app into production:
https://github.com/boldpoker/edeliver
It handles all the basic things I needed to get an app up and running, and supports hot-code upgrades. It supports multi-host deployments, but I think if you want auto-scaling you'll need to do some more work.
One thing to be aware of is that if you're deploying any NIFs or any native-compiled code, not BEAM, then you can't deploy directly from Mac to Linux servers, you'll need to use VMware or VirtualBox or something to actually do the builds. This includes any packages you use which are using natively-implemented code, which I'm pretty sure includes packages that do password hashing and such.