Though if people consistently over decades sing a language's praises on a single point consistently like they do the beam on this point, it's usually not without merit
According to others in this discussion they also made architecture changes (DB, Kafka etc.). Do we know if that improved the performance?
There is no objective way we can tell if Elixir had any performance impact. It could have been due to the rewrite, the architecture change or a combination of both.
Take the hot code reloading and actor model-based concurrency as a prime example. It's like getting AWS-level functionality without the steep bill for a lot of companies.
Though, I gotta admit, it used to be a hard sell for CPU-heavy workloads, especially number crunching. But Elixir is stepping it up with their Nx library, so that's changing.
Examples of companies cashing in on BEAM's efficiency:
Bleacher Report: Went from 150 servers down to 5. No joke.
Discord: Handles millions of real-time users without breaking a sweat or the bank.
Financial Times: Their content recommendation engine got both efficient and cost-effective.
Change.org: More petitions, fewer servers.
Podium: A million SMS messages a day and didn't have to massively scale hardware.what are "extremely powered machines"?
> It's like getting AWS-level functionality without the steep bill
which part of AWS functionality? load-balancing Beanstalk-style is free. AWS compute is not free, but neither is compute free with Elixir or whatever stack you run.
Similarly, distributed Erlang allows Elixir to run across multiple nodes. This could cut down the need for extra AWS instances or orchestration layers like Elastic Beanstalk. And when it comes to deployments, Elixir's hot code swapping can simplify what might otherwise require rolling updates or blue-green deployments with Elastic Load Balancers in the AWS ecosystem.
On the concurrency front, Elixir is designed for handling a high number of users and tasks simultaneously, which might reduce your reliance on EC2 or Lambda. Phoenix, Elixir's web framework, even has real-time capabilities baked in, so you don't need extra services like AWS WebSockets for that.
Finally, Elixir's actor model can serve as an in-memory message queue, which could potentially negate the need for something like AWS's SQS. So, while you're still incurring compute costs, the need for additional AWS services could be lessened, thereby simplifying your architecture and perhaps lowering overall costs.
Yeah the BEAM with some Rust NIFs is a great combo. I'd definitely consider it in the future for many types of problems and anything involving a HTTP or GraphQL interface.