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Elixir vs Erlang: What are the differences?
Elixir: Dynamic, functional language designed for building scalable and maintainable applications. Elixir leverages the Erlang VM, known for running low-latency, distributed and fault-tolerant systems, while also being successfully used in web development and the embedded software domain; Erlang: A programming language used to build massively scalable soft real-time systems with requirements on high availability. Some of Erlang's uses are in telecoms, banking, e-commerce, computer telephony and instant messaging. Erlang's runtime system has built-in support for concurrency, distribution and fault tolerance. OTP is set of Erlang libraries and design principles providing middle-ware to develop these systems.
Elixir and Erlang can be categorized as "Languages" tools.
"Concurrency" is the top reason why over 124 developers like Elixir, while over 49 developers mention "Real time, distributed applications" as the leading cause for choosing Erlang.
Elixir and Erlang are both open source tools. Elixir with 15.6K GitHub stars and 2.22K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Erlang with 7.74K GitHub stars and 2.1K GitHub forks.
Poll Everywhere, NoRedInk, and Resultados Digitais are some of the popular companies that use Elixir, whereas Erlang is used by WhatsApp, Heroku, and thoughtbot. Elixir has a broader approval, being mentioned in 177 company stacks & 190 developers stacks; compared to Erlang, which is listed in 70 company stacks and 47 developer stacks.
#rust #elixir So am creating a messenger with voice call capabilities app which the user signs up using phone number and so at first i wanted to use Actix so i learned Rust so i thought to myself because well its first i felt its a bit immature to use actix web even though some companies are using Rust but we cant really say the full potential of Rust in a full scale app for example in Discord both Elixir and Rust are used meaning there is equal need for them but for Elixir so many companies use it from Whatsapp, Wechat, etc and this means something for Rust is not ready to go full scale we cant assume all this possibilities when it come Rust. So i decided to go the Erlang way after alot of Thinking so Do you think i made the right decision?Am 19 year programmer so i assume am not experienced as you so your answer or comment would really valuable to me
We have a lot of experience in JavaScript, writing our services in NodeJS allows developers to transition to the back end without any friction, without having to learn a new language. There is also the option to write services in TypeScript, which adds an expressive type layer. The semi-shared ecosystem between front and back end is nice as well, though specifically NodeJS libraries sometimes suffer in quality, compared to other major languages.
As for why we didn't pick the other languages, most of it comes down to "personal preference" and historically grown code bases, but let's do some post-hoc deduction:
Go is a practical choice, reasonably easy to learn, but until we find performance issues with our NodeJS stack, there is simply no reason to switch. The benefits of using NodeJS so far outweigh those of picking Go. This might change in the future.
PHP is a language we're still using in big parts of our system, and are still sometimes writing new code in. Modern PHP has fixed some of its issues, and probably has the fastest development cycle time, but it suffers around modelling complex asynchronous tasks, and (on a personal note) lack of support for writing in a functional style.
We don't use Python, Elixir or Ruby, mostly because of personal preference and for historic reasons.
Rust, though I personally love and use it in my projects, would require us to specifically hire for that, as the learning curve is quite steep. Its web ecosystem is OK by now (see https://www.arewewebyet.org/), but in my opinion, it is still no where near that of the other web languages. In other words, we are not willing to pay the price for playing this innovation card.
Haskell, as with Rust, I personally adore, but is simply too esoteric for us. There are problem domains where it shines, ours is not one of them.
Pros of Elixir
- Concurrency169
- Functional155
- Erlang vm130
- Great documentation110
- Great tooling103
- Immutable data structures84
- Open source79
- Pattern-matching76
- Easy to get started61
- Actor library58
- Functional with a neat syntax29
- Ruby inspired28
- Homoiconic24
- Erlang evolved23
- Beauty of Ruby, Speed of Erlang/C21
- Fault Tolerant17
- High Performance13
- Simple13
- Good lang10
- Stinkin' fast, no memory leaks, easy on the eyes9
- Doc as first class citizen9
- Pipe Operator9
- Resilient to failure7
- Fun to write6
- OTP5
- GenServer takes the guesswork out of background work5
- Fast, Concurrent with clean error messages4
- Idempotence4
- Not Swift4
- Pattern matching4
- Error isolation2
- Easy to use1
- Dynamic Typing1
Pros of Erlang
- Concurrency Support59
- Real time, distributed applications59
- Fault tolerance55
- Soft real-time34
- Open source30
- Functional programming20
- Message passing19
- Immutable data14
- Works as expected12
- Facebook chat uses it at backend4
- Practical3
- Knowledgeable community3
- Bullets included2
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Cons of Elixir
- Fewer jobs for Elixir experts11
- Smaller userbase than other mainstream languages7
- Elixir's dot notation less readable ("object": 1st arg)5
- Dynamic typing4
- Difficult to understand1
- Not a lot of learning books available1