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Comment by travisgriggs | Hacker News Reader

I've been playing with Elixir in my background time; I'm liking it so far. What, if any, effect does a new release of Erlang/OTP have on Elixir? Is there usually a new follow on release of Elixir that chases the new features of the new Erlang release?

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Improvement to the VM or underlying stdlib that are API compatible are "free"

But. Elixir maintain a 2 otp release compatibility. So the elixir stdlib cannot use new functionality until the release of elixir in 2 years.

You can, ofc, just call the erlang lib yourself.

So on this one, you get the JIT or my float_to_string pretty printer speedup for free. But the Map module cannot use the new maps functions for 2 years.

A lot of OTP improvements benefit whatever version of Elixir you're using or you can access directly from the erlang library (e.g. When OTP 22 came out, you could use the new socket api (:socket.open(...)).

But some additions require a new Elixir release. One that comes to mind was the new guard clause to check if a key is in a map.

I don't know about the key guard check. They will help me simplify a lot of code. Can someone point that out in the Elixir docs?

https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/Kernel.html#is_map_key/2

If you use a version of Elixir built against the correct OTP release, you'll get the following automatically:

VM Performance improvements - normally this is minor but for this release it's a big big thing

Bug fixes - to standard library and VM

New Erlang APIs to use directly - you can call Erlang functions easily from Elixir, allowing you to leverage new standard library features, but they won't be used by Elixir because of the compatibility guarantees discussed elsewhere here

how do i know if im using the right Elixir version for otp?

Run elixir -v in the terminal. It will tell you with what OTP version it was compiled:

  Erlang/OTP 23 [erts-11.1.6] [source] [64-bit] [smp:8:8] [ds:8:8:10] [async-threads:1] [hipe]

  Elixir 1.11.3 (compiled with Erlang/OTP 23)

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