Ask HN: Operational experiences with Elixir-lang
Hi, I would like to know some IRL experiences with the use of Elixir-lang with a focus towards the operational aspects of supporting a Elixir based application. Some big wins, weird quirks? Thanks!
Which is a pretty good endorsement, in my book.
I will say that the production deployment process and tooling is not purely Elixir at this point (yet). People tend to use the Ruby Capistrano gem to deploy... which works... but to me gives sort of a cognitively dissonant experience :)
Another quirk I noticed is that IEEE floating point is not completely supported, for example there is no "Infinity" value and working with large numbers will often get you rounding errors. For example, using the Math.pow function (the ONLY native power function!) ONLY works with floating point values so using it will get you large-number roundoff errors. Some libs have been written to manage numeric data better (in my case I literally had to look up an efficient integer power algorithm and implement it, see https://github.com/pmarreck/elixir-snippets/blob/master/math...) but the lack of native support there is weird (and Erlang's fault, really), especially coming from Ruby.