I use Elixir daily for the past 8 months, and I love it. For my personal projects, I use a great Heroku-like service called Gigalixir (https://gigalixir.com/). No restarts or connection limits for the free tier, and it runs on your choice of Google Cloud or AWS behind the scenes. Elixir doesn't have as many easy cloud deployment options as, say, JS, so this service is really helpful.
Would you still pick Elixir in 2019?
21–30 of 246 posts
Re: Would you still pick Elixir in 2019?
#22I keep wanting to be hyped about elixer but the performance benchmarks confuse me. If you look at the tech emperor benchmarks[1] phoenix makes the list at #46 registering 16% of the performance of the top framework. I'm willing to sacrifice performance for readable maintainable code but it just surprises me that its that slow. Anyone know whats going on there? 1. https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r…
I don't know the exact specifics here but I know a lot of communities that rank high invest time contributing into the open source Tech Empower tests for their framework. This way they can tweak & make sure their stack runs at optimal speeds.
At the same time, Elixir (and Erlang) are not meant for raw speed. It is best used for real time communication, lots of users & handling errors. At least that is what I have read.
Re: Would you still pick Elixir in 2019?
#23Could someone give a more concise reason for using Elixir? I have a "rule of 3" for checking out things - the third time I hear it mentioned and it seems interesting, then I'll go check it out. Elixir is past 3 times - so I will check it out for sure! - but this article didn't seem to actually say anything (seemed more like a PR piece that was trying not to be technical, and the main argument appeared to be "well, it…
It is an ergonomic language built on top of a stable, performant, proven runtime with a lot of features built-in.
It's a nice ecosystem with a good culture in a language that promotes pretty good programming practices.
The only major downsides (if they even are for you) are that it's dynamic--not good for number crunching, though you can connect to compiled binaries--and is not strongly typed--which can lead to runtime bugs.
That said, part of the philosophy is to enable fast failure without taking down the whole application. In communications, it's not considered the end of the world to drop or fail on one connection, so it works well for web services, chat, etc.
Re: Would you still pick Elixir in 2019?
#24Could someone give a more concise reason for using Elixir? I have a "rule of 3" for checking out things - the third time I hear it mentioned and it seems interesting, then I'll go check it out. Elixir is past 3 times - so I will check it out for sure! - but this article didn't seem to actually say anything (seemed more like a PR piece that was trying not to be technical, and the main argument appeared to be "well, it…
I would say it's about developer happiness while coding and that all the decisions made by Jose and the core team tend to have been the correct decision. So taking Phoenix as an example you look at the framework and every time they find a problem i.e. Presence instead of saying that's a difficult problem and moving on they fix said problem in a really scalable way [1].
The same could be said for things like data processing with Flow [2] or even things like Ecto (semi official database wrapper) or even third party libraries like say ex_money [3].
Then you start looking at the packages and language and see that there are rarely thousands of bugs or that the infrastructure (mix, hex, docs etc.) is really nice to use and that the language is really stable, yet still provides you with useful but clear abstractions. Or that you can spin off processes and tasks inline without too much worry, or that you can use 20+ years of Erlang libs transparently, or that it's immutable and has the best concurrency primitives of any system available, or that it allow you to supervise processes and let them crash if needed without bringing down your app, or that you can transparently get multi machine out of the box, or that message passing is build in as the default way to scale the system. Or pattern matching or |> or the amazing community.
[1] https://phoenixframework.org/blog/the-road-to-2-million-webs... and https://dockyard.com/blog/2016/03/25/what-makes-phoenix-pres...
Re: Would you still pick Elixir in 2019?
#25I keep wanting to be hyped about elixer but the performance benchmarks confuse me. If you look at the tech emperor benchmarks[1] phoenix makes the list at #46 registering 16% of the performance of the top framework. I'm willing to sacrifice performance for readable maintainable code but it just surprises me that its that slow. Anyone know whats going on there? 1. https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r…
>Anyone know whats going on there?
Yup, many things.
It's worth reading this very long thread about exactly this, from 2016. Look for Sasa Juric and Chris McCord's comments in particular. [1]
tl;dr benchmarks are hard, not all benchmarks are implemented well, Elixir folks haven't heard back from Tech Empower re: details of errors rates etc. It's an unfair analysis, and not just for Elixir.
Re: Would you still pick Elixir in 2019?
#26Isn't Elixir the most efficient thing available?
Re: Would you still pick Elixir in 2019?
#27The JavaScript Fatigue argument is not good. There's simply no data that backs it and nobody is forced to use new libraries only because they use JavaScript. I've seen third party dependencies churn on Elixir as well (packages that are no longer maintained or alternatives that are better) - I think it's an inherent problem with using dependencies and has nothing to do with the programming language in which those depe…
"backend" and "JavaScript" quite don't fit together in the same phrase.
I would never work on backend with JavaScript or any other interpreted language, due to error proness.
Re: Would you still pick Elixir in 2019?
#28I've been using Elixir to build applications for production use for 3 years now my summary is I and my whole team can (in contrast to languages I've used in the past):
- Ship faster
- Write simple, readable, reliable and fast code
- Scale easier and with less resources
- Onboard and train new hires into the code base quicker
I know I'm making it out to be a panacea which to be clear it isn't as the deployment story still has some final pieces for the core team to work through but I will say I'll continue to use it to build in the future
Re: Would you still pick Elixir in 2019?
#29Could someone give a more concise reason for using Elixir? I have a "rule of 3" for checking out things - the third time I hear it mentioned and it seems interesting, then I'll go check it out. Elixir is past 3 times - so I will check it out for sure! - but this article didn't seem to actually say anything (seemed more like a PR piece that was trying not to be technical, and the main argument appeared to be "well, it…
I think the real killer feature of Elixir is that it is a friendly, Ruby-like language that gives you access to the underlying power of Erlang/OTP on the Beam VM.
OTP (Open Telecom Platform) is a set of tools, libraries, and middleware that was built around Erlang. This has been in development since the 90s, and was originally developed by Ericsson for the telecom industry to handle massive numbers of concurrent connections without a single point of failure (I may be butchering this story, but this was the end result). OTP includes things like extremely lightweight processes, process supervision to quickly restart based on your desired behavior, multiple native real-time datastore options (both in-memory and/or persistent), hot deployments with no downtime, an extensive standard library, and other cool things that have stood the test of time. All of this just comes with the base Erlang/OTP installation.
Elixir essentially introduces a modern ecosystem around the Erlang/OTP system.
Re: Would you still pick Elixir in 2019?
#30Could someone give a more concise reason for using Elixir? I have a "rule of 3" for checking out things - the third time I hear it mentioned and it seems interesting, then I'll go check it out. Elixir is past 3 times - so I will check it out for sure! - but this article didn't seem to actually say anything (seemed more like a PR piece that was trying not to be technical, and the main argument appeared to be "well, it…
The real "killer feature" is the Erlang VM (the BEAM). Thanks to a combination of exceptionally lightweight "processes" (not true OS processes, a construct of the VM), which share nothing, can only interact through message passing, and which can be supervised by other processes, it's possible to build incredibly robust systems.
Elixir makes the Erlang VM much more pleasant to use in my opinion (plenty of Erlangers will disagree with this, ymmv). It provides a developer-friendly, modern ecosystem, with doc support, testing support, a great macro language for building DSLs, package management, etc, but underlying it all is a battle-tested VM, that has been under active development for 30 years.