I’m primarily a C++ dev, so that colors a lot of what I think about the 3rd party library situation in Elixir. Because of the abysmal state of package management in C++, it’s usually easier to implement stuff yourself (tailored exactly to your own needs, and therefore with an extremely limited scope) than it is to bring in a heavyweight third-party library.

For that reason, I was pretty comfortable coming to Elixir and implementing Somewhat esoteric, games-specific networking stuff myself. It would have been nice if the library had already existed, but I am so glad I went with Elixir rather than Node or PHP (which both do have the game networking library I needed).

My experience has basically been that the “fat head” of open source libraries exists in Elixir, but the long tail of more esoteric stuff does not. By its nature, though, you won’t need 99% of the esoteric stuff available in other languages.