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Ask HN: Why Isn't Elixir More Popular?

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Re: Ask HN: Why Isn't Elixir More Popular?

#51

Post by victorbjorklund »

viccis wrote: post #27
goralph wrote: post #13

In a commercial setting (i.e. not a side-project) the choice of programming language is also a business decision. The main factors being: - How large is the pool of available candidates for this language? A recruiting risk. - How mature is this language? A business continuity risk.

>How large is the pool of available candidates for this language? A recruiting risk. I worked at a company with a massive Erlang codebase. Really nasty, not really following good OTP practices, etc. HUGE hiring problem and it took 6-12 months to spin up new devs to the point that they could really have ownership over things. And this is not a system that even remotely needed this. Elixir might seem better until you w…

You def dont need to learn Erlang to code in Elixir (other than maybe the very basics to interact with some Erlang libraries like ETS).

Re: Ask HN: Why Isn't Elixir More Popular?

#52

Post by josevalim »

hakunin wrote: post #47
josevalim wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’m still looking back at Elixir with nostalgia, wondering if I’m going to have a chance to go back to it and really make it an extension of my arms/brain like Ruby had become. You should give it another try. :) You jumped in quite early, when we were still collectively figuring out what it meant to build Phoenix applications, and many things were in flush back then. You probably went through Ecto 1 -> 2 -> 3 and P…

> You probably went through Ecto 1 -> 2 -> 3 and Phoenix was migrating to contexts. > But I also have to say there was a lot of FOMO in relation to OTP back then: people felt they had to build these amazing supervision designs, otherwise they were not using the language correctly. Exactly! Contexts really threw me off, because I couldn't figure out how/why would I set a boundary up front, if I'm not even sure how the…

Understandable! The documentation provides quite more guidance now (and there is nothing wrong with naming your context after your "models").

Re: Ask HN: Why Isn't Elixir More Popular?

#53

Post by steve_adams_86 »

ipnon wrote: post #35
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to say this is a really good summary from my perspective too. Different exposure and projects, but the experience in terms of ergonomics and other developer experience was much the same. I never felt truly proficient. I recall years ago interviewing for a role and straight up telling the interviewer I wasn’t very good with Elixir. That’s just how it made me feel. In retrospect I was fine, I built some interest…

I have this same feeling using Elixir, and I think it’s because it’s excellent at showing you exactly where you have undefined behavior in your application, much in the same way you spend most of your time writing Rust by wrangling with the compiler that keeps showing you all the holes in your logic. You can write a seemingly equivalent program in Python, and it runs just fine because it’s interpreted, so it seems li…

This is a huge part of it, for sure.

I think this is why people often dislike state machines too, for example. They force you to really think through what you're trying to do, and there are no shortcuts.

The irony is that the state machine pattern itself kind of is a shortcut to stable, reliable, safe code. People find them overly complex and full of ceremony, but it's like... Do you really want to try getting the same assurances from your code without this kind of abstraction? I'd rather know my I can't shoot myself in the foot, because I guarantee you that I will.

Elixir also has the added layer of unfamiliarity for a lot of people (myself included) where you might intuitively know how to do something imperatively, but you need to do it within the FP paradigm. I like FP and have adopted a lot of its patterns all over the place, but I still find I'm not a great FP thinker in general. After something like 10 years. My FP-fu is limited to relatively basic operations, and when I go into advanced territory I'm constantly leaning on reference material. That's more so a skill issue than an Elixir issue.

Re: Ask HN: Why Isn't Elixir More Popular?

#54

Post by DoesntMatter22 »

josevalim wrote: post #48
DoesntMatter22 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you are agreeing with me. You tried to work on it years ago and didn't fix it. Even when it was completing last year it's performance was half of what Rails was, which isn't known to be fast [1]. The database pool needs to be at 512 to 1024? Yet Rails seems to get away with far less than that and still have better performance.[2] Even if, somehow, Elixir is actually faster, which seemingly lacks evidence…

> The database pool needs to be at 512 to 1024? Yet Rails seems to get away with far less than that and still have better performance.[2] Rails concurrency model is per process . So you will have `n_workers` pools and the amount of connections will be `n_workers * 3` based on the code you shared. The production machine has 28 total threads [1], which means Rails is starting 35 workers, according to their auto tuning…

Nice to see elixir put up decent benchmarks for once. It looks like it's about 80 percent faster. Still a far cry from "10 to 20x reduction in size and cost".

Re: Ask HN: Why Isn't Elixir More Popular?

#55

Post by gregors »

madamelic wrote: post #25
elcritch wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> From metrics, computing AWS signatures takes up an absurdly large amount of CPU time. The actual processing of events is quite minimal and honestly well-architected, a lot of stuff is loaded into memory rather than read from disk. There's syncing that happens fairly frequently from the internet which refreshes the cache. Oh, sounds nice! Caching in Elixir really is nice. Okay, that makes sense. Elixir isn't fast at…

Thank you! You gave me a great term that I can jump off from (NIF). I'll have to rig up Observer. I've been using recon because I was being lazy overall.

Once upon a time I needed to do hashes en masse for a specific blockchain projects. Just a tad of Rust (via nif) really helped the performance. Might be of help to you, check this out (not my lib)

https://github.com/ExWeb3/ex_keccak

for my usage, benchmarks went from 2.79K ips to 346.97K ips

Re: Ask HN: Why Isn't Elixir More Popular?

#56

Post by michalbcz »

ipnon wrote: post #35
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to say this is a really good summary from my perspective too. Different exposure and projects, but the experience in terms of ergonomics and other developer experience was much the same. I never felt truly proficient. I recall years ago interviewing for a role and straight up telling the interviewer I wasn’t very good with Elixir. That’s just how it made me feel. In retrospect I was fine, I built some interest…

I have this same feeling using Elixir, and I think it’s because it’s excellent at showing you exactly where you have undefined behavior in your application, much in the same way you spend most of your time writing Rust by wrangling with the compiler that keeps showing you all the holes in your logic. You can write a seemingly equivalent program in Python, and it runs just fine because it’s interpreted, so it seems li…

> The upside being that unlike Python none of these errors are usually strong enough to be fatal to your application.

That's a great point. Each language has its domain where it excels. The reality is that 90% (or more) of all apps don't deal with the traffic scale of YouTube, the complexity of an operating system, or the mission-critical constraints of software for the F-35. For most businesses, Python is more than sufficient in 2024. At the same time, for learners, it's much easier to pick up. It's a sweet spot.

Re: Ask HN: Why Isn't Elixir More Popular?

#57

Post by gregors »

toldyouso2022 wrote: post #44

Used elixir a few years ago for tutorials and such, worked fine. Tried to use it again in 2023, vscode extension would break. Tried on 2 windows machine and one linux machine, exetension always broke. I then figured out why (I don't remember the exact reason, it was one of those "yeah I can see why it didn't work and it's my fault but it kinda isn't really" situations) but at that point I was done because I had bette…

You might have missed this recent announcement

https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2024/08/15/welcome-elixir-langu...

Re: Ask HN: Why Isn't Elixir More Popular?

#58

Post by josevalim »

DoesntMatter22 wrote: post #54
josevalim wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The database pool needs to be at 512 to 1024? Yet Rails seems to get away with far less than that and still have better performance.[2] Rails concurrency model is per process . So you will have `n_workers` pools and the amount of connections will be `n_workers * 3` based on the code you shared. The production machine has 28 total threads [1], which means Rails is starting 35 workers, according to their auto tuning…

Nice to see elixir put up decent benchmarks for once. It looks like it's about 80 percent faster. Still a far cry from "10 to 20x reduction in size and cost".

YMMV. In benchmarks like cached queries, it already outputs a solid 5.5x faster than Rails, and it is worth remembering that the Rails app is way too stripped compared to what folks are actually running in prod (which was one of my original criticisms).

Re: Ask HN: Why Isn't Elixir More Popular?

#59

Post by gregors »

josevalim wrote: post #32
DoesntMatter22 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This fits my experience too. I've been able to crush elixir apps pretty easily, cowboy and phoenix. I actually think Elixir really doesn't have great performance. TechEmpower, which is IMO the most real world standardized tests out there shows that Phoenix doesn't even complete. And Elixir+Plug+Ecto performs worse than Rails, which is an entire framework. Everyone in Elixir land tells me "Oh those benchmarks don't ma…

> And they say "Oh we didn't care to put much effort into it", Yet Jose Valim himself tried to work on it and didn't fix it. This is inaccurate. I have started looking again into solutions only last week [1]. My suspicion was always the database pool size was too small but, when I tried to contribute 4+ years ago, fine tuning was hard because it took too long, so I didn't pursue it further [2]. My discontent with the…

The techempower repo is literally a gift to the world. I've seen and learned many ways of optimizing code ...almost none of which should ever be used in production or would ever make it past a PR at most companies. Still, it's amazing in the amount of non-realistic approaches used. It really is a work of art.

Re: Ask HN: Why Isn't Elixir More Popular?

#60

Post by gregors »

As an in-the-code CTO that runs small teams, I've used Elixir/Phoenix quite successfully.

Hiring has never been an issue, in fact - Elixir was a tool to recruit a specific senior developer we wanted but couldn't pay them what they wanted due to budget. Elixir interest got them to come on board. I've trained a number JR developers with no prior experience with great success.

I was all in on Rails for over a decade, Elixir/Phoenix has definitely replaced that stack for me. I think it hits a sweet spot in terms of runtime performance and developer productivity. The latter is not something you can afford to ignore on small teams.

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