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Comment by tlack | Hacker News Reader

Great list. For #4, you should take a look at Erlang or Elixir - they have "just enough" concurrency with streaming primitives and a functional style that makes it easy to use. They make a lot of "bolt on" stuff you need for a regular startup (Redis, Celery, etc) superfluous.

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Could you briefly elaborate on this? Are you suggesting the right structures within Elixir/Erlang are both concurrent and safe enough to negate the need for these things at some level? (And are you referring to things like OTP, or more general than that?)

EDIT: For context, I'm familiar with the concurrency model and with how fairly bulletproof "processes" are in their context, but had never considered putting these to use in lieu of a Redis cache or certain other datastore use-cases. (My brief foray into Elixir was, however, when looking to improve reliability of a high-volume messaging system and various task queues attached to it, so that use-case I am at least aware of)

I wouldn't say Elixir is highly concurrent in the sense that you'll get something like a CRDT out of the box. You'll still have to design all of your distribution logic.

I'm saying that the tools provided in that toolbox - like processes, OTP and ETS - let you build in-memory or disk backed structures that live inside the concern of the main application and are more responsive to your specific needs.

For instance, let's say you need a scoreboard that persists in between page refreshes.

With Node.js, you're left in a "hmm - not sure" space where you need to cobble together all the different pieces. At the end of the day you'll be facing cache consistency issues, problems saving state, abstraction leaks and communication overhead.

In Elixir, it's trivial to use pubsub to collect events, a GenServer to store that state or act as a broker, and ETS to perform simple queries against it. It's like you're still given just a box of tools, but all of the tools work together better for dynamic, live, complex applications.

Your mileage may vary! Let me know if I can help.

I am actually super familiar with Erlang and Elixir and I agree with your assessment, but with the caveat that if you go that route you end up with your own hand-rolled solution that won't be wire/API compatible with the most used OS projects. Or in the case of Erlang/Elixir you'll be running it in process! But it is great for that reason.

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