Erlang has define style macros (since forever?).

R16 works with utf-8 binaries just fine. <<"Foo"/utf8>> you might need to put a preprocessor flag to set the default encoding for source files (the default changed in 17 or 18, I think); also settings may be needed for console output (but that probably applies to elixir too). Erlang strings are lists of Unicode code points, if you're putting a list of utf8 bytes in there, that's not ideal (but you probably want binaries instead of lists, most of the time anyway)