> But for a long list of reasons, I wouldn't use it for anything other than prototyping/hobby projects.
My position is pragmatic, from a managerial economics perspective, of maximizing value and reducing risk. I suspect that Elixir attracts a fair amount of language enthusiasts, who are somewhat biased when they evaluated the business value of a language choice.
WhatsApp/Discord is a very specific use case, of needing a high number of concurrent users that expect real-time messages when to the same session (e.g. chat/chatroom, "Bob is typing..."). AFAIK, BEAM excels at immutability (lots of reads, like readers in a chatroom) and concurrency (vertical scalability). So those are not appropriate reference use cases for the typical user.
BEAM is notoriously slow, and has been bottom-ranking in Techempower benchmarks. Although that seems to have improved in recent years.
https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#hw=ph&test=json§...