Why Elixir (2014) • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Elixir (2014)

#21

Post by davydog187 » Wed, Mar 27, 2024, 1:22 PM UTC

williamdclt wrote: post #20

sph wrote: post #2

From the author of this post, here's one of the best demos of Elixir, Erlang and modern distributed computing in general: "The Soul of Erlang and Elixir • Saša Jurić • GOTO 2019" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvBT4XBdoUE When you feel sufficiently amazed by this demo, I also recommend the Elixir in Action book, by this same author, to get started with this incredible ecosystem and paradigm. --- It's hard to imagi…

I’m an elixir noob, but I’m actually surprised that the distributed story is not _better_. For example, a big thing about OTP is that it allows running many processes that communicate by message passing: but all these processes are _colocated_ to a given node, i would have expected that OTP (or genserver or whatever) handles clustering of machines, scheduling of workloads and routing of messages for me so that I can…

I think you need to go deeper, because it does exactly all the things you’re describing out of the box.

A process can be anywhere in the cluster, and you can interact with it as if it was on your local node.

I use all of these facilities in production on my product with ease. I’m happy to answer your specific questions.

Re: Why Elixir (2014)

#22

Post by jorams » Wed, Mar 27, 2024, 1:23 PM UTC

williamdclt wrote: post #20

sph wrote: post #2

From the author of this post, here's one of the best demos of Elixir, Erlang and modern distributed computing in general: "The Soul of Erlang and Elixir • Saša Jurić • GOTO 2019" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvBT4XBdoUE When you feel sufficiently amazed by this demo, I also recommend the Elixir in Action book, by this same author, to get started with this incredible ecosystem and paradigm. --- It's hard to imagi…

I’m an elixir noob, but I’m actually surprised that the distributed story is not _better_. For example, a big thing about OTP is that it allows running many processes that communicate by message passing: but all these processes are _colocated_ to a given node, i would have expected that OTP (or genserver or whatever) handles clustering of machines, scheduling of workloads and routing of messages for me so that I can…

Erlang/Elixir nodes can actually be rather trivially clustered, you can spawn processes on other nodes and transparently pass messages to processes on other nodes, including things like closures. It does not magically schedule workloads across the cluster, but there are libraries that can do so.

Re: Why Elixir (2014)

#23

Post by sb8244 » Wed, Mar 27, 2024, 1:25 PM UTC

williamdclt wrote: post #20

sph wrote: post #2

From the author of this post, here's one of the best demos of Elixir, Erlang and modern distributed computing in general: "The Soul of Erlang and Elixir • Saša Jurić • GOTO 2019" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvBT4XBdoUE When you feel sufficiently amazed by this demo, I also recommend the Elixir in Action book, by this same author, to get started with this incredible ecosystem and paradigm. --- It's hard to imagi…

I’m an elixir noob, but I’m actually surprised that the distributed story is not _better_. For example, a big thing about OTP is that it allows running many processes that communicate by message passing: but all these processes are _colocated_ to a given node, i would have expected that OTP (or genserver or whatever) handles clustering of machines, scheduling of workloads and routing of messages for me so that I can…

You can message pass across a cluster. In fact, it's identical code to message a remote vs local process.

Erlang provides "process groups" that allow you to structure groups of processes across a cluster.

It doesn't try to be magic. It's not a workload scheduler or "automatic distributed machine".

You structure things the way you want, on top of it's primitives. It's just that all of the primitives you need are built in and work really well.

Re: Why Elixir (2014)

#24

Post by dragosmocrii » Wed, Mar 27, 2024, 1:25 PM UTC

Elixir is amazing. Had a stab at it back in 2018, then shifted to work with other traditional langs/stacks, but Elixir has always stayed in the back of my head teasing me. It's an elegant language, that you can see that the authors have put effort in keeping it lean, powerful, expressive. Phoenix (which is the goto web framework) may seem magical in the beginning, but once you dive in you realize that there is no magic, it's all there explicitly in modules (well maybe for macros which do feel magical). What I was missing back in 2018 is IDE support which was iffy. I wonder how that changed recently, if anyone who knows cares to share?

Re: Why Elixir (2014)

#25

Post by brightball » Wed, Mar 27, 2024, 1:26 PM UTC

williamdclt wrote: post #20

sph wrote: post #2

From the author of this post, here's one of the best demos of Elixir, Erlang and modern distributed computing in general: "The Soul of Erlang and Elixir • Saša Jurić • GOTO 2019" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvBT4XBdoUE When you feel sufficiently amazed by this demo, I also recommend the Elixir in Action book, by this same author, to get started with this incredible ecosystem and paradigm. --- It's hard to imagi…

I’m an elixir noob, but I’m actually surprised that the distributed story is not _better_. For example, a big thing about OTP is that it allows running many processes that communicate by message passing: but all these processes are _colocated_ to a given node, i would have expected that OTP (or genserver or whatever) handles clustering of machines, scheduling of workloads and routing of messages for me so that I can…

It does all of that.

The structure of the system is such that you can call any function on any node in the cluster.

In order to do it well, you need to understand your own abstractions. If we have a cluster are we better off passing every function around the cluster or running some locally? Is the network overhead worth it in every case or only in some?

It's up to your code to make those determinations about your application, but everything you describe is fairly simple to implement on the BEAM.

Re: Why Elixir (2014)

#26

Post by arrowsmith » Wed, Mar 27, 2024, 1:26 PM UTC

sph wrote: post #2

From the author of this post, here's one of the best demos of Elixir, Erlang and modern distributed computing in general: "The Soul of Erlang and Elixir • Saša Jurić • GOTO 2019" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvBT4XBdoUE When you feel sufficiently amazed by this demo, I also recommend the Elixir in Action book, by this same author, to get started with this incredible ecosystem and paradigm. --- It's hard to imagi…

I'm working through Elixir in Action now - it's fantastic. I could have saved a lot of time and effort if I'd read it years ago.

Re: Why Elixir (2014)

#27

Post by lawik » Wed, Mar 27, 2024, 1:50 PM UTC

williamdclt wrote: post #20

sph wrote: post #2

From the author of this post, here's one of the best demos of Elixir, Erlang and modern distributed computing in general: "The Soul of Erlang and Elixir • Saša Jurić • GOTO 2019" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvBT4XBdoUE When you feel sufficiently amazed by this demo, I also recommend the Elixir in Action book, by this same author, to get started with this incredible ecosystem and paradigm. --- It's hard to imagi…

I’m an elixir noob, but I’m actually surprised that the distributed story is not _better_. For example, a big thing about OTP is that it allows running many processes that communicate by message passing: but all these processes are _colocated_ to a given node, i would have expected that OTP (or genserver or whatever) handles clustering of machines, scheduling of workloads and routing of messages for me so that I can…

As others have commented it can do all this. What it doesn't do is automatically balance/place GenServers and processes across your cluster. This is up to you. The ways in which you distribute work across a cluster is full of trade-offs.

Need raft concensus? Paxos? Something else? Want to place work with consistent hashing? Want to hydrate/dehydrate with persistence vs memory only?

Those are all important decisions and the languages do not force you to one option.

Re: Why Elixir (2014)

#28

Post by gv83 » Wed, Mar 27, 2024, 1:56 PM UTC

“Why not Elixir” is a more interesting question and I suggest you go ask it to engineering managers of polyglot organizations. They will usually bring you the super low nps from not-elixir-only devs and the resignation letters from elixir “talents” that are asked to do non elixir stuff.

Re: Why Elixir (2014)

#29

Post by cproctor » Wed, Mar 27, 2024, 2:18 PM UTC

sph wrote: post #2

From the author of this post, here's one of the best demos of Elixir, Erlang and modern distributed computing in general: "The Soul of Erlang and Elixir • Saša Jurić • GOTO 2019" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvBT4XBdoUE When you feel sufficiently amazed by this demo, I also recommend the Elixir in Action book, by this same author, to get started with this incredible ecosystem and paradigm. --- It's hard to imagi…

A great talk, but that cameraperson got a workout!

Re: Why Elixir (2014)

#30

Post by nesarkvechnep » Wed, Mar 27, 2024, 2:19 PM UTC

gv83 wrote: post #28

“Why not Elixir” is a more interesting question and I suggest you go ask it to engineering managers of polyglot organizations. They will usually bring you the super low nps from not-elixir-only devs and the resignation letters from elixir “talents” that are asked to do non elixir stuff.

Is this a problem with Elixir? Have you seen a Java dev using a different technology? They usually haven't even heard of anything besides Java.