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Comment by mark_round | Hacker News Reader

You're about the 5th person now in as many days who has recommended Elixir when I mentioned I was building a project in Ruby. I'll definitely have to check it out for my next project (whatever that may be!)

Can you expand on why you found it so appealing or "holy crap, this is awesome" things I should look at first ?

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Not the guy, but I used rails at my old job for one and a half year, and used it in some personal projects. I looked into Elixir(and Phoenix) during this time, and Phoenix felt like it was designed for more modern websites, where RoR is built for older and tries to adapt to handle modern ones. It just feels that when you want to do something more responsive in Elixir, it's designed for it, but in Rails, it feels like you're doing something unorthodox or something that is added as an afterthought. Obviously this isn't quite accurate, but it is the vibe I got.

Elixir is also a very cool language in a lot of ways. I wouldn't go all in on Elixir/Phoenix, but that's because there's not a huge demand for it, at least where I reside. I would 100% consider it for some smaller projects though, if I stood between that and Rails, and I wouldn't mind having to get more comfortable with Elixir.

Edit: I haven't used Rails 8, and haven't followed the ecosystem since a bit before, so not sure how this feels nowadays. I *really* enjoy Rails backend though, but the frontend stuff never quite clicked.

Counterpoint on the "going all-in": we have a 7 year old Elixir/Phoenix project that currently sits at ~100K LOC and I couldn't be happier.

It has been absolutely wonderful building this with Elixir/Phoenix. Obviously any codebase in any language can become a tangled mess, but in 7 years we have never felt the language or framework were in our way.

On the contrary: I think Elixir (and Phoenix) have enabled us to build things in a simple and elegant way that would have taken more code, more infrastructure, and more maintenance in other languages/frameworks.

I think the OP's point was the job market. I.e. you probably aren't hiring for that role.

Not OP, but I made the move from Ruby/Rails to Elixir years ago, so I'll try to answer from my perspective.

Elixir is a functional programming language based on the "BEAM", the Erlang VM. We'll get back to the BEAM in a moment, but first: the functional programming aspect. That definitely took getting used to. I remember being _very_ confused in the first few weeks. Not because of the syntax (Elixir is quite Ruby-esque) but because of the "flow" of code.

However, when it clicked, it was immediately clear how easy it becomes to write elegant and maintainable code. There is no global state in Elixir, and using macros for meta-programming are generally not encouraged. That means it becomes very easy to reason about a module/function: some data comes in, a function does something with that data, and some data comes out. If you need to do more things to the data, then you chain multiple functions in a "pipe", just like how you chain multiple bash tools on the command line.

The Phoenix framework applies this concept to the web, and it works very well, because if you think about it: a browser opening a web page is just some data coming in (an HTTP GET request), you do something with that data (render a HTML page, fetch something from your database, ...) and you return the result (in this case as an HTTP response). So the flow of a web request, and your controllers in general, becomes very easy to reason about and understand.

Coming back to the BEAM, the Erlang VM was originally written for large scale (as in, country size) telephony systems by Ericsson. The general idea is that everything in the BEAM is a "process", and the BEAM manages processes and their dependencies/relationships for you. So your database connection pool is actually a bunch of BEAM processes. Multi-threading is built-in and doesn't need any setup or configuration. You don't need Redis for caching, you just have a BEAM process that holds some cache in-memory. A websocket connection between a user and your application gets a separate process. Clustering multiple web servers together is built into the BEAM, so you don't need a complex clustering layer.

The nice thing is that Elixir and Phoenix abstract most of this away from you (although it's very easy to work with that lower layer if you want to), but you still get all the benefits of the BEAM.

Something I never quite understood: differentiate between BEAM process and operating system process. The OS has launched one (in theory) BEAM Erlang VM runtime process with N threads; are we saying “process” here to try to emulate the OS process model internally within the BEAM OS process, when really we’re talking about threads? Or a mix of threads and other processes? I’m imagining the latter even cross network, but am I at least on the right track here?

A BEAM process is not an OS thread. The way I understand it, a BEAM process is just a very small memory space with its own heap/stack, and a message system for communication between BEAM processes.

The BEAM itself runs multiple OS threads (it can use all cores of the CPU if so desired), and the BEAM scheduler gives chunks of processing time to each BEAM process.

This gives you parallel processing out of the box, and because of the networking capabilities of the BEAM, also allows you to scale out over multiple machines in a way that's transparent to BEAM processes.

When I first started out with Elixir, it was more the overall architecture that first sold it to me. It is remarkably robust, my impression is that you can more or less yank RAM modules out of the server while it is running, and the last thing which will crash is Elixir. And it is absolutely top in class when it comes to parallel processing and scaleability. Not only how it does it internally, but also how it abstracts this in a way that just makes sense when you are working with it.

When it comes to web development specifically, what really got me hooked, was LiveView from the Phoenix framework. It keeps a persistant WebSocket connection to the client which it uses to push DOM updates directly. Instead of the usual request/response cycle on the client side, the server holds the state and just pushes the diff to the browser. It just made so much sense.

I've put together a number of resources here: https://elixirisallyouneed.dev

Great site. Thanks.

I am/was a huge Ruby fanboy, and I used Rails a lot and loved it (though had some criticisms around too much "magic"). I made the jump to Elixir/Phoenix around 8 years ago, and have loved it. Phoenix to me basically "fixed" all the things I didn't like about Rails (basically opacity and hard-to-find-where-it's-happening stuff due to someone metaprogramming aggressively). I will admit that I've been a functional programming fan for a very long time too. I always write my ruby code in a functional style unless there's a good reason not to (which is increasingly rare).

I still love and use ruby a ton for scripting, and still reach for Sinatra for super simple server needs, but Phoenix is my go-to stack these days.

I've also found the Elixir community to be amazing in the same ways the Ruby community is/was. It's not all roses, for example there's not as many libraries out there. Distribution is also not awesome so for example I currently use ruby or rust when writing CLIs. But for anything distributed (especially web) Phoenix is amazing.

This is a self plug, but I did a conference talk introducing Ruby veterans to Elixir/Phoenix some years ago. It's probably aged a bit, but should still be pretty accurate. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPWMBDTPMkQ

The original conference talk is here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSoz7q37KGE), though the made-for-youtube version above is better because it's slightly updated, and I didn't run out of time :-)

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