Does anyone use Elixir/Erlang anymore?
Scala is kind of a more modern alternative.
If doing a twitter like platform, elixir with Phoenix channels could handle around >20k users per host. Very few other options work for that use case. =3
https://blog.stenmans.org/theBeamBook/#_concurrency_parallel...
Erlang is simply the right language to build a chat server with, and it doesn't make sense to rewrite it in another language, even though Facebook did that with the server for Messenger. :P
Certainly parts of the WhatsApp stack have changed considerably. No more FreeBSD / no more only a handful of OS processes per node, much less Mnesia (not sure if there's any Mnesia left... I don't get that level of information). I've seen signs that they may have returned to large nodes, so they might be back to millions of connections per node, but that was very much not the case when I left; connection counts had dropped on our FreeBSD nodes because we were doing a lot more on the chat channel and then again because the Facebook nodes we migrated to were so much smaller than our FreeBSD nodes.
The problem is finding talent that knows both distributed systems, and Erlang/Elixir. But Erlang/OTP can replace a lot of expensive kludges. =3
If you can convince your employer of that. I'm working on a system today (and not for the first time) that could have significantly reduced complexity by switching to Erlang (or Elixir) and OTP. Amusingly, it's a glorified, in-house telecom system that was developed because they chose not to buy an existing solution.
Notably, it is possible to rebuild or move the entire infrastructure by issuing a signed resend-logs-to-new-consumer request to clients or servers.
If you start with a dumpster fire at a dried fish factory, than 3 week solutions that last 6+ years under load look pretty nice in retrospect. Your boss is probably contemplating why most Erlang/Elixir people don't work for clown wages. =3
> If you can convince your employer of that.
It's probably easier to find an employer that's already convinced. But that's not easy either. :P I'm working in Rust now, because that's what the employer wants to do and it works enough. Half of my work problems would evaporate if we switched to BEAM, but I'd still have the other half and new ones and I'm not sure the rest of the team would be as excited as I am. And they almost certainly wouldn't let me hot load code, which means less fun and less fast iteration :(
Convincing an employer to switch languages is generally hard, regardless of which language, but switching to a system built on BEAM is probably a bigger change than most.