He had so much energy for the project in the early days. Although I've moved on to other tech the excitement around Node back then was great. I miss it
Yes, I'm not worried about it. I've not been following it as closely as I'd like, but from what I've read the core team seems to be taking a very measured incremental approach with the type system.
Ports are generally great, but you are running multiple apps and communicating between them using STDIN/STDOUT etc. There are certain corner cases where they might not be suitable. I had been using an OPCUA library where the logging had to be turned off because otherwise it was sending the logs back to our Elixir app and we were expecting Elixir terms. Also the shutdown of the remote end of a port can stop the data getting back to Elixir. There are ways around all of this but it's slightly annoying. In general though, ports work 80% of the time and are really convenient.
I will second this. I've been using multiple libraries in our production Elixir app that haven't been updated in the last five years. Elixir itself was declared as "stable" feature-wise years ago. It may be argued that the type system being introduced is not in-keeping with that, but not sure. Jose is a very cautious and diligent "benevolent dictator" and you get a lot of backward compatibility guarantees. Erlang is the same. Compared to what some people might be used to with churn in Node/React etc it is apples and oranges.
I don't think this is right. The process will crash, and the Supervision strategy you are using will determine what happens from there. This is what the BEAM is all about. The thing with NIFs is that they can crash the entire VM if they error.