It seems like a lot of companies are moving to Go for fast services. As a rails dev for 10+ years, I am looking at Go instead of Elixir and Phoenix, b/c Go is a much more popular language than Elixir.
My anecdotal view of the marketplace is that Elixir recruitment emails tend to come from startups looking for their 2nd or 3rd dev, usually full stack, and the salaries are nothing special. Go recruitment emails tend to come from bigger companies looking for backend devs, often hoping for kubernetes experience too, and the pay is higher.
I built an internal service with LiveView at work and I loved it. I gave a presentation about how it all works and was hoping it would catch on. It didn’t. The front end team would probably mutiny if we told them to give up React and level up their LiveView skills.
If I were running a web business as a solo founder I would 100% want to use LiveView. As a dev on a larger team that already has specialization it’s a tougher sell.
You shouldn't really compare it to React, you should compare it to your whole stack, and see how a lot of the code and the worries just kind of go away.
This is much like how it used to be with classic server-side rendered Rails/PHP/Phoenix... except with LiveView you can update part of the page running on the client, in response to events coming from the client without a page refresh.
Some other things to consider are that Go's concurrency model is quite bloated when compared to Elixir's, Go uses public memory for its goroutines vs. Elixir's private memory that protects processes, Go uses cooperative multitasking vs. Elixir's preemptive model, and Go's dependency handling is absolute rubbish. Elixir's process supervision is amazing and Elixir's pattern-matching allows you to write easier-to-read and more maintainable code, in my opinion.
While both are good languages, I've personally found Elixir > Go.
I'm currently planning a SaaS project and had settled on go, but this discussion is making me wonder if perhaps Elixir is the better choice.
OPT, which is how you build supervision trees and other more complex Elixery things, is tricky at first but reading through Designing Elixir Systems with OTP, by James Edward Gray & Bruce A. Tate, and The Little Elixir & OTP Guidebook, by Benjamin Tan Wei Hao should clear it up fairly well.
This is highly subjective, of course, but I've written code in C, C++, Pascal, Basic, Python, Perl, Ruby, JavaScript, Go, PHP, Java, C#, Clojure, Scheme, Cobol, and Pick Basic (of all things). Elixir has been my most favorite language so far.