The best tools are the ones you don’t even notice, and Elixir is an absolute pleasure. You get to focus on the problem with little ceremony. Chat is a really interesting application of Channels, too.
It’s especially interesting to me as my team and I are working on a hosted API called Chatkit that makes it equally easy to add real-time chat to your applications, no matter what technology you’re using: https://pusher.com/chatkit
In addition to basic chat data, we also manage, “Who’s online”, typing indicators, rich media... And more
I highlight those features in particular because I am especially curious what that would look like with Elixir and Pheonix? Managing chat data, especially at scale is quite a hairy problem.
By the way, it simple/clean to subscribe to Elixir Channels on other platforms like Android and iOS, for example? One place we think we can add a lot of value is X-platform client SDKs (JavaScript, Kotlin, Swift, etc.)