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Elixir 1.12

elixir-lang.org

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Re: Elixir 1.12

#41

Post by sneako »

thibaut_barrere wrote: post #32
WayToDoor wrote: post #3

See also, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27192873 (Ask HN: Are you satisfied with Elixir or do you regret choosing Elixir?) with great insights about the language. Another popular thread that comes to mind is the one about Discord scaling Elixir ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14748028 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19238221 )

Disclaimer: I use Elixir in production (e.g. here on the French national transport data hub https://transport.data.gouv.fr/?locale=en ), but I also like other tools (Ruby, Rust, Crystal etc). My impression is that some (not all) people had a bad experience partly because they may have reached for Elixir at a period where everything wasn't "settled" (a bit too young). The "first vague of hype" generated some libraries…

Check out Saxy for XML: https://github.com/qcam/saxy

I found it to be extremely performant (especially when compared to the built in xmerl) and I like using the SAX technique.

Re: Elixir 1.12

#42

Post by thibaut_barrere »

sneako wrote: post #41
thibaut_barrere wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: I use Elixir in production (e.g. here on the French national transport data hub https://transport.data.gouv.fr/?locale=en ), but I also like other tools (Ruby, Rust, Crystal etc). My impression is that some (not all) people had a bad experience partly because they may have reached for Elixir at a period where everything wasn't "settled" (a bit too young). The "first vague of hype" generated some libraries…

Check out Saxy for XML: https://github.com/qcam/saxy I found it to be extremely performant (especially when compared to the built in xmerl) and I like using the SAX technique.

Saxy is already in my bookmarks because we're going to ingest the largest XML files I've ever scanned with Elixir soonish.

Thanks for reporting a good experience, this gives me hope that my task won't be daunting!

Re: Elixir 1.12

#43

Post by rubyn00bie »

losvedir wrote: post #8

Several versions ago Jose talked about how Elixir is basically "done", which is so refreshing these days! But since then, the developer experience has improved by leaps and bounds through all these improvements other than the core language. As a professional Elixir developer for the last 4 years, I'm loving it. A few improvements in the last few versions off the top of my head that have been really nice: * Robust, ti…

> Mix.install

This is game changing for me (my life is boring). I totally didn't even know this was coming. It's like unexpected Christmas! For folks not in the know, it's been kind of a PITA to have packages loaded in an Elixir repl without a proper project. This should enable a lot more developer tooling to exist too; I'm stoked because I have one tool in particular that's going to be immediately be useful thanks to this change.

Re: Elixir 1.12

#44

Post by 1_player »

yannoninator wrote: post #7

Looking into Elixir, but from what i've heard, Elixir isn't very memory efficient when it comes to web servers. Is that still the case? Also where does one host Elixir apps these days? Heroku, Vercel or Bare metal?

My Elixir backend, doing background processing, admin interface, data ingestion and serving data via GraphQL consumes 300 MB RAM on average, which is 20% less memory than the Node/Next.JS React frontend. YMMV.

Re: Elixir 1.12

#45

Post by chrismccord »

yannoninator wrote: post #7

Looking into Elixir, but from what i've heard, Elixir isn't very memory efficient when it comes to web servers. Is that still the case? Also where does one host Elixir apps these days? Heroku, Vercel or Bare metal?

For a frame of reference, an Erlang VM running all of Phoenix will consume 16MB memory on startup, so we need more details on what exactly you've heard and for what usecases. For the Phoenix channels 2M connection benchmark, some folks claimed go uses less memory for websockets, but neglected to consider our realtime layer monitors connections for multiplexed messaging, handles distributed PubSub, etc, so it wasn't a proper comparison. There are certainly nuanced convos we could have about memory usage vs other platforms, but a blanket "non memory efficient for web" anecdote is inaccurate :)

Re: Elixir 1.12

#46

Post by sodapopcan »

WayToDoor wrote: post #3

See also, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27192873 (Ask HN: Are you satisfied with Elixir or do you regret choosing Elixir?) with great insights about the language. Another popular thread that comes to mind is the one about Discord scaling Elixir ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14748028 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19238221 )

It makes me really sad that Elixir isn't more popular than it is. I'm just a hobbyist but would jump at a good opportunity to write it full time (though I'm really happy with my current employer and want to put more time in with them). There's just so little BS in the language itself (by my standards). A good Elixir program reads SO well thanks to some strong conventions. I particularly like how it's very common to forgo imports and just prefix functions with their module name. That coupled with it being functional make for very little need to jump around when trying to understand a function--everything is just right there. It's also so nice having a performant, query-able key-value store at your fingertips. Anyway, I dunno, I know that it being a dynamic language is a deal-breaker for many but gah, I'm rambling at this point. I just really, really like it.

Re: Elixir 1.12

#47

Post by scns »

konart wrote: post #25
nelsonic wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly that HN thread is biased toward the person/team that is "leaving" Elixir because it wasn't a good fit for them. For the people who understand Elixir/OTP's strengths it's excellent. We use Elixir for several apps and haven't had any issues recruiting/training people (remote). If we were to chose again we would 100% pick Elixir; nothing else comes close for our use-case.

> For the people who understand Elixir/OTP's strengths it's excellent. Is there any place to read about this on a more or less basic level? I bet many people will just ask what benefits they may get from this instead of apps build using Go (for example) + rabbitmq

Sorry only have a video for you, still worth watching IMHO https://youtu.be/JvBT4XBdoUE

Re: Elixir 1.12

#49

Post by fastball »

losvedir wrote: post #8

Several versions ago Jose talked about how Elixir is basically "done", which is so refreshing these days! But since then, the developer experience has improved by leaps and bounds through all these improvements other than the core language. As a professional Elixir developer for the last 4 years, I'm loving it. A few improvements in the last few versions off the top of my head that have been really nice: * Robust, ti…

Wait Elixir didn't have a good approach for env vars until recently?

That is like, item one on my list of things I need to be able to handle in a backend web application.

Re: Elixir 1.12

#50

Post by weatherlight »

nelsonic wrote: post #4
WayToDoor wrote: post #3

See also, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27192873 (Ask HN: Are you satisfied with Elixir or do you regret choosing Elixir?) with great insights about the language. Another popular thread that comes to mind is the one about Discord scaling Elixir ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14748028 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19238221 )

Sadly that HN thread is biased toward the person/team that is "leaving" Elixir because it wasn't a good fit for them. For the people who understand Elixir/OTP's strengths it's excellent. We use Elixir for several apps and haven't had any issues recruiting/training people (remote). If we were to chose again we would 100% pick Elixir; nothing else comes close for our use-case.

I went though that persons submissions/comments on HN. its literally the only time they mention Elixir, everything else is ruby/rails or python. Makes me wonder if it's a troll post.
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