Unpacking Elixir: Concurrency

Post by fndex » Fri, Aug 25, 2023, 3:43 PM UTC

cultofmetatron wrote: post #67

fndex wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is coming from someone who likes Elixir. Not much for its distributed systems features, but mostly because of the language design. I keep hearing everyone talk about how Erlang/Elixir gives everything out of the box and you don't need to worry about Queues, RPC or whatever... But in reality, people don't really recommend using Distributed Erlang that much, on most Elixir gigs I worked, they didn't use Distribute…

well my startup uses distributed elixir. we use it horde to distribute certain long lived processes accross our cluster. that does not exclusive to kuernetes. we user kubernetes to manage and handle vm crashes (its only happened twice ever) as well as porvide consistent network toplogy between the nodes. that said, having the ability to send messages between machines without having to bring in an external dependency…

Post by weatherlight » Fri, Aug 25, 2023, 4:11 PM UTC

fndex wrote: post #65

weatherlight wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, in big orgs, that adopt Elixir/Erlang, along with other technologies with poor concurrency stories, those other ecosystems still need Kubernetes, Kafka, Redis and GRPC, to get by. elixir isn't going to make ruby or python apps magically concurrent. So that make sense. However, in orgs that are primarily Elixir shops, I don't see a lot of Kafka or gRPC. (Redis is just useful, its more than just a queue and K8s a…

>those other ecosystems still need Kubernetes, Kafka, Redis and GRPC, to get by And what makes Elixir not need Kafka, Redis or GRPC? Instead of Redis, you could use ETS for caching. But once you have 2+ instances of your app, you will need to have a centralized caching mechanism, otherwise, each instance will have its own ETS with its own memory, not sharing anything. Unless you decide to use Distributed Erlang and c…

Post by mikhailfranco » Fri, Aug 25, 2023, 4:25 PM UTC

hinkley wrote: post #59

tombert wrote: post #39

Disckaimer: I have never used Elixir in any serious capacity, but I have done a good chunk of Erlang. Concurrency in Erlang sort of frustrates me...not because it's bad, but because when I use it I start getting pissed at how annoying concurrency is in nearly every other language. So much of distributed systems tooling in 2023 is basically just there to port over Erlang constructs to more mainstream languages. Obviou…

Any sufficiently complicated distributed program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Erlang

Post by mikhailfranco » Fri, Aug 25, 2023, 4:29 PM UTC

fndex wrote: post #65

weatherlight wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, in big orgs, that adopt Elixir/Erlang, along with other technologies with poor concurrency stories, those other ecosystems still need Kubernetes, Kafka, Redis and GRPC, to get by. elixir isn't going to make ruby or python apps magically concurrent. So that make sense. However, in orgs that are primarily Elixir shops, I don't see a lot of Kafka or gRPC. (Redis is just useful, its more than just a queue and K8s a…

>those other ecosystems still need Kubernetes, Kafka, Redis and GRPC, to get by And what makes Elixir not need Kafka, Redis or GRPC? Instead of Redis, you could use ETS for caching. But once you have 2+ instances of your app, you will need to have a centralized caching mechanism, otherwise, each instance will have its own ETS with its own memory, not sharing anything. Unless you decide to use Distributed Erlang and c…

Post by mikhailfranco » Fri, Aug 25, 2023, 4:41 PM UTC

xwowsersx wrote: post #76

Elixir with static typing would be an absolute dream. I know there's https://gleam.run/