This makes me think of DotCloud, the precursor to Docker Inc. The idea that you can run anything has been around for a while. I don't see how Fly.io is especially good for Elixir. It seems to be about delivering reliable resources for each service, and it works no matter the web framework, as long as you have a PaaS that's geared towards running arbitrary OCI images. These posts seem a lot like the content on the DigitalOcean site, except they're written by staffers instead of freelancers. https://www.digitalocean.com/community/pages/write-for-digit...
Elixir and Rust is a good mix
81–90 of 165 posts
Re: Elixir and Rust is a good mix
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
I tried Haskell for a while and switched to Common Lisp (although I still follow Haskell from a distance). My experience just doesn't match up with the claim that a project of any size written in an untyped inevitably descends into a dumpster fire. I've worked on largish systems in several dynamically-typed languages and several statically-typed and I personally haven't noticed any major difference in overall product…
The issue isn't productivity. As far as just slamming out code untyped languages are undeniably faster. The issue is working on projects once they've reached a certain size where you have no idea what the intent of the original author was and you maybe need to refactor, add-in major pieces, or change anything with the expectation that it continues to work.
Untyped code bases with microservices are the best code bases out there by far.
They are exceptionally easy to refactor, add-in new parts, etc.
The keyword is microservices, you need to know how to do proper microservices if you are using untyped code.
Re: Elixir and Rust is a good mix
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Using Rust afterwards was great, plus it was faster than the BEAM. I guess, why not use Rust entirely instead of as a FFI into Elixir or other backend language? Sure, you just need to reimplement light-weight threading with preemptive scheduling prioritizing latency over throughput, extremely robust fault tolerance with a supervision hierarchy, and runtime introspection with code hotloading capabilities. Maybe you…
Is any of this needed though? For some use cases yes, but for many no. It's possible the parent has no practical use for these capabilities.
If you're building a project that actually benefits from Elixir/Erlang's features, you can have a constructive discussion about whether those features justify sacrificing static typing. If you don't actually benefit from those features, "I tried to use a language that's unfit for my purposes and found it unfit for my purposes" is a comment of very limited value.
Re: Elixir and Rust is a good mix
#84This makes me think of DotCloud, the precursor to Docker Inc. The idea that you can run anything has been around for a while. I don't see how Fly.io is especially good for Elixir. It seems to be about delivering reliable resources for each service, and it works no matter the web framework, as long as you have a PaaS that's geared towards running arbitrary OCI images. These posts seem a lot like the content on the Dig…
Elixir does distribution and concurrency really well, so Fly making multi-region deployments easy makes it a good fit.
Re: Elixir and Rust is a good mix
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
While I'm pretty solidly in the "pro-typing" camp, it seems worth acknowledging that such projects often turn into dumpster fires in typed languages as well, even expressively typed languages.
Maybe, maybe not - but in my experience, a dumpster fire with static types is easier to read and understand and also easier to refactor.
You think that statically typed languages don’t often turn into dumpster fires? Not my experience! Even though there are real advantages.
Re: Elixir and Rust is a good mix
#86This makes me think of DotCloud, the precursor to Docker Inc. The idea that you can run anything has been around for a while. I don't see how Fly.io is especially good for Elixir. It seems to be about delivering reliable resources for each service, and it works no matter the web framework, as long as you have a PaaS that's geared towards running arbitrary OCI images. These posts seem a lot like the content on the Dig…
One of the interesting bits about Fly is we have our own servers distributed globally and connected via wireguard. Which makes it is trivial to setup Elixir/Erlang distribution globally, and most importantly, close to your customers. While its not a magic bullet it is pretty amazing to type a few commands have a globally deployed and directly distributed application.
Further Fly builds its Dashboard internally with Phoenix LiveView. We want the Phoenix and Ruby and Laravel and more communities soon, to grow because we believe if they grow, we will too.
Re: Elixir and Rust is a good mix
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nobody code without a type system. The distinction is build time vs runtime type checking. At build time you catch bugs that would appear later at runtime. Which is more costly to fix later.
> Which is more costly to fix later. This assumption is changed, IMHO, by Erlang. Hot loading makes the cost to make small changes very low. So the question becomes, do you pay the definite cost of build time type checking (usually includes coding time type annotation), or do you accept the possible future cost to making small fixes. Of course, if you work in an organization where even a small fix requires months to…
The cost at runtime also includes loss of data, inferior user experience, direct financial loss or even loss of human life for some systems.
It really depends on the domain but it definitely is more than pushing an update.
Re: Elixir and Rust is a good mix
#88I used to use Elixir, but the lack of static types got to me (especially since I prefer the type-driven development methodology). Using Rust afterwards was great, plus it was faster than the BEAM. I guess, why not use Rust entirely instead of as a FFI into Elixir or other backend language? I've been using Axum and it works pretty well. The only time I had to do FFI with Rust was with Flutter via flutter_rust_bridge,…
I'm in the same boat with Elixir. I love many aspects of the language, but it borrows the fast-and-loose type ecosystem of ruby. nil is an especially big problem. Any value could be nil, and this will absolutely bite you over and over. nil even allows you to use square brackets for some reason (some_nil_value[:some_key]) which is a great way to disguise the actual issue. There is optional type checking with Dialyzer,…
I disagree. Any value could be nil, but any value could be 5, too. In fact, nil is just like any other atom. Elixir shines when you lean on pattern matching as much as possible. Your functions should unpack as much as possible within the function definition, frankly the "if" macro is completely superfluous to case and in rare cases cond. You'll find that you match the data you want, and thus reject anything else.
Square bracket dictionary accesses are a code smell, because you should be using %{^key = val} = dict or Map.fetch(map, key) or rarely Map.fetch!(map, key).
If you do that, managing typing in Elixir just boils down to defining structs to differentiate cases where dictionary A and dictionary B contain similar keys but strictly are not interchangeable.
Re: Elixir and Rust is a good mix
#89This makes me think of DotCloud, the precursor to Docker Inc. The idea that you can run anything has been around for a while. I don't see how Fly.io is especially good for Elixir. It seems to be about delivering reliable resources for each service, and it works no matter the web framework, as long as you have a PaaS that's geared towards running arbitrary OCI images. These posts seem a lot like the content on the Dig…
Elixir does distribution and concurrency really well, so Fly making multi-region deployments easy makes it a good fit.
So is Fly good for small sites or is it good for huge sites? What's a big customer? For small sites my idea of a multi-region deployment is a single-region deployment that works in multiple regions thanks to the magic of the Internet.
I see this which mostly seems to be content sites. https://www.wappalyzer.com/technologies/paas/fly-io/ Same on the first forum result: https://community.fly.io/t/customer-success-stories/4882
Re: Elixir and Rust is a good mix
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rust doesn't have a lot of good runtime introspection tools (or they're very not obvious). If you're running a system with a lot of concurrency, it's nice to be able to attach a debugger and find out exactly what's going on with each of your tasks. I haven't seen hot loading for Rust (but a quick search shows there's some out there), and I'm not sure how amenable Rust is to dlopen and friends to force the issue. Erla…
>Also, some of us are as anti-typing as you are pro-typing. Assuming ample experience with both, how does one reach this conclusion? I have yet to see a project of any size that needs to be worked on by multiple teams and is written in an untyped language not descend into dumpster fire.
I have yet to see a project of any size that needs to be worked on by multiple teams not descend into dumpster fire. Typing can definitely help, but it's just a small tool. Java is a pretty typed language and I'm seen some real doozy code bases in Java.