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Elixir 1.5 released

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Re: Elixir 1.5 released

#91

Post by grasleya »

vignesh_m wrote: post #84
deedubaya wrote: post #63

I highly recommend playing with Elixir or another purely functional language. I've only gone through the Programming Elixir book[1], but it has fundamentally challenged how I think about solving problems in other languages. [1]( https://pragprog.com/book/elixir13/programming-elixir-1-3 )

I've tried functional languages (Haskell) before and found them fun, but couldn't find a good project I can use them in. Can someone suggest a fun project, which can showcase the features of functional programming?

Functional languages are perfectly capable languages so you can typically use them for anything you'd use any other language for. But if you want a project that specifically showcases functional programming, writing a parser using parser combinators can be fun and instructive.

Re: Elixir 1.5 released

#92

Post by udfalkso »

pmarreck wrote: post #43
pmontra wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, I just finished to setup a build and deploy system for Phoenix using edeliver and it's definitely not nice. A bunch of files in different languages, it feels unnecessarily hard. I hope that'll put some effort in that.

I host the production site I'm working on at Gigalixir[1] (with the postgres DB in Google Cloud) and it's been pretty sweet. Deploys have been trivial (the way they should be, if you aren't interested in also becoming a devops expert). Jesse Shieh is extremely responsive and a committed founder. Unlike Heroku, Gigalixir does not restart its servers nightly, which is very relevant if you store any state app-side (such…

I wasn't aware of Gigalixir, thanks for mentioning that. Looks very promising.

I've been hosting my site at https://clever-cloud.com with good results. I've been using Docker there but they just added beta Phoenix support which makes it really easy. They're French, and I'm in the US. So there have been time zone issues and support has been a bit lackluster at times, but generally they've fixed all the issues I've brought up and have been responsive. Price is right.

Re: Elixir 1.5 released

#93

Post by udfalkso »

Touche wrote: post #60

What do people use as a PaaS provider for Erlang/Elixir?

See above. Someone mentioned Gigalixir, and I've been having success with Clever Cloud. I had to do a ton of research before finding a workable option (Heroku is not really a good option imo), so hopefully this helps.

Re: Elixir 1.5 released

#94

Post by Scarbutt »

pjungwir wrote: post #79

Can anyone doing Phoenix in production share their typical HTTP response times? I built a small Phoenix project about a year ago, and compared to Rails it wasn't quite as fluent but still pretty nice. But ever since then, I've been trying to decide if the extra development time is worth it for the performance gains. I get that Elixir is more scalable, and I love how the RAM requirements compared to Rails are tiny, bu…

For single a web api server Elixir is going to be far behind, performance wise, against nodejs, the JVM and Go. Their big feature is reliability/clustering but in the context of web requests, scaling them is real easy today, just use a load balancer. For me Erlang/Elixir have very specific niche use cases(at which it excels at) but its fans confuse beginners promoting it as a "general purpose language" that they should use it for everything.

Re: Elixir 1.5 released

#95

Post by pjungwir »

udfalkso wrote: post #89
pjungwir wrote: post #79

Can anyone doing Phoenix in production share their typical HTTP response times? I built a small Phoenix project about a year ago, and compared to Rails it wasn't quite as fluent but still pretty nice. But ever since then, I've been trying to decide if the extra development time is worth it for the performance gains. I get that Elixir is more scalable, and I love how the RAM requirements compared to Rails are tiny, bu…

I recently rewrote an (admittedly old and stale) django app from the ground up with Elixir/Phoenix. The website gets quite a bit of traffic. I went from an elaborate multi-tier caching setup, with varnish and memcache, to a ZERO caching setup. The amount of complexity reduced by doing this is huge. The Elixir app hits the postgres db for nearly every request and I'm getting average response times around 45ms. Quite a…

You and blatyo are convincing me. :-) I really appreciate your openness in sharing these stats. I don't need to serve 2 million concurrent websockets. But I need to render HTML/JSON based on some database queries, under moderate traffic, and I'd like to get it under 200ms without trying so hard.

I mostly agree with DHH that response time is dominated by database queries and Rails is "fast enough". Most problems you can fix by improving your query patterns or doing some SQL tuning. And yet . . . Rails is still awfully slow! Most companies don't have time for Russian-doll caching, let alone making the designers consider that at design time. I would love to use something as effortless as Rails that still gave me snappy performance well into the app's maturity.

I'm fairly confident Elixir can do that, but it's hard to look at these benchmarks and come on HN and hear the Elixir folks saying, "Just trust me." There is a strong temptation to walk away thinking it just doesn't live up to the hype. So having some hard numbers is a great reassurance. Thank you!

Re: Elixir 1.5 released

#96

Post by hota_mazi »

deedubaya wrote: post #63

I highly recommend playing with Elixir or another purely functional language. I've only gone through the Programming Elixir book[1], but it has fundamentally challenged how I think about solving problems in other languages. [1]( https://pragprog.com/book/elixir13/programming-elixir-1-3 )

If you are interested in learning a purely functional language, I'd recommend against picking a dynamically typed language like Elixir.

Functional programming only starts to show its power with types and parametric polymorphism (higher kinds, etc...). Without type annotations, all you get is a watered down, crippled version of what a functional language can achieve.

Re: Elixir 1.5 released

#97

Post by hota_mazi »

pmarreck wrote: post #37
sotojuan wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's got HN hype and a lot of the negatives that come with that (awful learning materials by people who haven't used it in production) and a decent amount of real world use though nothing major for now.

Also, Bleacher Report is a pretty large site on it: http://www.techworld.com/apps-wearables/how-elixir-helped-bl... They went from 150 Rails servers to 5 BEAM servers "and could probably get away with two" (!)

To be fair, if you're running Rails, any different choice of technology will yield huge performance improvements.

Re: Elixir 1.5 released

#98

Post by alexcastano »

FanaHOVA wrote: post #78
digitalzombie wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gotta get more people to make noises really. It tough now since the web space is very competitive. Before that it's just PHP (well it displaced Perl) and then RoR pop out to give it a real competition. For a while you'd think Ruby was going to over take PHP for web dev but it eventually converge to a steady state the growth rate isn't increasing at all. If you look at tiobe index and red monk's for language popularit…

> For a while you'd think Ruby was going to over take PHP for web dev but it eventually converge to a steady state the growth rate isn't increasing at all. Rails downloads almost doubled from 2015 to 2016 (15M -> 24M). Not sure where you see that the "growth rate isn't increasing at all". Source: RubyGems db data dump (more stats here: https://infinum.co/the-capsized-eight/analyzing-rubygems-sta... )

I've always thought that this is a consequence of tools like Docker, where each new image installs the gems from the beginning; but I could not prove my theory.

Re: Elixir 1.5 released

#99

Post by blatyo »

pjungwir wrote: post #95
udfalkso wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently rewrote an (admittedly old and stale) django app from the ground up with Elixir/Phoenix. The website gets quite a bit of traffic. I went from an elaborate multi-tier caching setup, with varnish and memcache, to a ZERO caching setup. The amount of complexity reduced by doing this is huge. The Elixir app hits the postgres db for nearly every request and I'm getting average response times around 45ms. Quite a…

You and blatyo are convincing me. :-) I really appreciate your openness in sharing these stats. I don't need to serve 2 million concurrent websockets. But I need to render HTML/JSON based on some database queries, under moderate traffic, and I'd like to get it under 200ms without trying so hard. I mostly agree with DHH that response time is dominated by database queries and Rails is "fast enough". Most problems you c…

One note on database time. If you're loading multiple related records, Ecto is able to do some of those requests concurrently. For example, if you get a user and their posts and comments, the fetch of user happens, and then posts and comments can be fetched concurrently.

Also, when I used rails, quite a bit of time was spent wrapping the data into active record objects, whereas Ecto returns simple data structures, which seems to be much faster.

Re: Elixir 1.5 released

#100

Post by passer-by-123 »

pjungwir wrote: post #95
udfalkso wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently rewrote an (admittedly old and stale) django app from the ground up with Elixir/Phoenix. The website gets quite a bit of traffic. I went from an elaborate multi-tier caching setup, with varnish and memcache, to a ZERO caching setup. The amount of complexity reduced by doing this is huge. The Elixir app hits the postgres db for nearly every request and I'm getting average response times around 45ms. Quite a…

You and blatyo are convincing me. :-) I really appreciate your openness in sharing these stats. I don't need to serve 2 million concurrent websockets. But I need to render HTML/JSON based on some database queries, under moderate traffic, and I'd like to get it under 200ms without trying so hard. I mostly agree with DHH that response time is dominated by database queries and Rails is "fast enough". Most problems you c…

The performance aspect also makes a huge difference in development. The application boots fast and the live reloading experience is rewarding. Having a 100 test cases that hit your endpoint+database running in less than a second is pure joy.
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