Comment by toast0 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by toast0 | Hacker News Reader

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> There is no technical limitation keeping you from serving HTTP traffic from Erlang/Elixir, but from my own experience it isn't a pleasant experience.

I would be interested in what was unpleasant? I've run inets httpd servers (which I did feel maybe exposed too much functionality), and yaws servers and yaws seems just fine. maybe yaws_api is a bit funky, too. I don't know the status of ACME integration, which I guess could make things unpleasant; when I was using it for work, we used a commercial CA, and my current personal work with it doesn't involve TLS, so I don't need a cert.

> you can probably even share Erlang's equivalent of file descriptors across servers (haven't tried, correct me if I'm wrong)

Ports are not network transparent. You can't directly send to a port from a different node. You could probably work with a remote Port with the rpc server, or some other service you write to proxy ports. You can pass ports over dist, and you can call erlang:node(Port) to find the origin node if you don't know it already, but you'd definitely need to write some sort of proxy if you want to receive from the port.

Perhaps I was a little harsh, this was a few years back when I was evaluating Elixir for a client, but ended up going back to a TS/Node.js stack instead. While the Phoenix documentation is stellar, I found it difficult to find good resources on best practices. I was probably doing something stupid and ran into internal and difficult to understand exceptions being raised on the Erlang side, from Cowboy if I recall. In another case, I was trying to validate API JSON input, the advice I got was to use Ecto (which I never really groked) or pattern match and fail. In JS, libraries like Zod and Valibot are a dream to work with.

The result was a lot of frustration, having been thoroughly impressed by Elixir and Phoenix in the past, knowing that I already knew how to achieve the same goal with Node.js with less code and would be able to justify the choice to a client. It didn't quite feel "there" to pick up and deploy, whereas SvelteKit with tRPC felt very enabling at the time and was easily picked up by others. Perhaps I need another project to try it out again and convince me otherwise. Funnily enough, a year later I replaced a problematic Node.js sever with Phoenix + Nerves running on a RPi Zero (ARM), flawless cross-compilation and deployment.

> Ports are not network transparent

I stand corrected, thank you for the explanation!

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