Hacker News Reader

Comment by guywithahat | Hacker News Reader

There's something about C++ developers that makes them love Go and Elixir (and I include myself in this demographic). I think it's something about the people who are attracted to C++ for performance are attracted to Go/Elixir for its multithreaded performance. Really cool project

View on HN

Not sure about C++ devs, but Erlang/Elixir are great to handle parsing of protocols, with its implementation of pattern matching. Also, makes the code much cleaner because pattern matching basically eliminates most branching and thus depth of the code base.

The let it crash philosophy allows you to ignore most corner cases with the knowledge that, if they are encountered or a cosmic ray flips a bit, the crash is localised to a single client. I have worked with Elixir almost a decade at this point, and I have never seen an unexpected downtime of the apps I deployed. Aside of maintenance and updates, they all have 100% uptime. How cool is that?

This is how I sell it to clients. “Will you be using Python, Go?” Me: “What about Elixir and the promise that your service won’t ever crash? And you get cool dashboards with it.” Them: “Sold.”

I wish there was a systems language that allows you to pattern match on structs and enums, and in function signatures like Elixir

Indeed. when your daily job is tracking down memory stomps, deadlocks, invalid pointers and unexpected state in very big codebases then using Elixir feels like "why is this so easy? it just works?". Also i'm a network programmer so the binary pattern matching is very much appreciated.

"The let it crash philosophy allows you to ignore most corner cases"

This is such a dangerous take. Also Elixir is not strongly typed, so...

It's not though. Processes can be supervised and crashes can just lead to "restart with good state" behavior. It's not that you don't try handling any errors at all, you just can be confident that anything you missed won't bring the system down.

And Elixir is strongly typed by most definitions. Perhaps you mean static?

You can be more confident. But remember that time an Ericsson switch crashed upon handling a message that it sends to adjacent switches every time it restarts? That crashed the whole network, and you could still do that in Erlang.

“Remember that one time that software crashed?”

The fact that you recall a single instance of crashing software says a lot about the quality assurance of the BEAM.

Maybe look into Inko[1]. It is has good pattern matching (but perhaps not on function/method signatures).

[1] https://docs.inko-lang.org/manual/latest/getting-started/pat...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com