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Comment by jeremyjh | Hacker News Reader

I'd just like to point out that while knowledge of OTP is a good thing for an Elixir developer, it isn't really needed for most application development. There are excellent libraries and frameworks that leverage OTP to provide a lot of value to their users, and most of us who use Elixir in industry just use those libraries.

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I would go so far as to say a beginner should not write genservers, and using genservers that aren't part of a library is usually an antipattern. When you're ready to write a serious library, then you're ready to write genserver.

Of course it's always good to understand genservers.

I'm working on a game backend (which I'm finding Elixir/Erlang pretty good for) and I don't see how I could reasonably do this without using my own GenServers.

I can see not writing my own GenServer for webapps, but when it comes to concurrency webapps tend to be dead simple. Elixir is a fine choice for these but I feel like its killer features don't shine that much over the alternatives.

Would you mind linking to a couple of them? I don't know anything about Elixir (but am very comfortable in a lot of other languages), and am interested in the kind of thing more experienced people are using with Elixir. Thanks!

For web applications, Phoenix is very popular: https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix; it uses some OTP directly and its dependencies like the web-server Cowboy use it as well.

DB development usually uses Ecto: https://github.com/elixir-ecto/ecto, it has OTP servers for connection pooling and other tasks.

For managing background tasks I use Honeydew: https://github.com/koudelka/honeydew

Your Phoenix link is broken (includes the semi-colon)

for the lazy: https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix

Phoenix is a good example. It makes great use of OTP, but you don't really need to touch OTP when using it to build web applications. You can, and your life as an Elixir dev will certainly be easier if you have some understanding of OTP, but it works great as a web framework even if you don't.

depends on the type of project for sure. possessing knowledge of OTP is a superpower. when working on any serious project, it will always help if there is at least one developer in the team who has knowledge about it.

unless you're only building web apps i don't know how you can build systems in elixir without touching otp

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