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  5. Elixir vs Julia

Elixir vs Julia

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Elixir
Elixir
Stacks3.5K
Followers3.3K
Votes1.3K
GitHub Stars26.0K
Forks3.5K
Julia
Julia
Stacks666
Followers677
Votes171
GitHub Stars47.9K
Forks5.7K

Elixir vs Julia: What are the differences?

Introduction

In this article, we will compare and highlight the key differences between Elixir and Julia programming languages.

  1. Syntax and Purpose: Elixir is a dynamic, functional programming language built on top of the Erlang VM, primarily designed for building scalable and maintainable applications. On the other hand, Julia is a high-level, high-performance programming language specifically designed for numerical and scientific computing tasks. Elixir follows a Ruby-inspired syntax, while Julia follows a syntax that is more similar to traditional programming languages.

  2. Concurrency Models: Elixir provides a powerful and scalable concurrency model called the Actor Model, which allows for easy distribution of work across multiple processes and nodes. It also provides lightweight processes, called "actors," which communicate with each other by message passing. Julia, on the other hand, follows a multi-threaded approach to concurrency, allowing for parallel execution of tasks using multiple threads. Julia provides constructs like tasks and coroutines to manage concurrency.

  3. Type System: Elixir has a dynamic and strong, yet flexible, type system that allows for polymorphism and pattern matching. It supports dynamic typing, which means that variables can hold values of any type and the type of a variable can change at runtime. Julia, on the other hand, has a type system which is both dynamic and static. It provides a type inference mechanism that allows the compiler to infer the types of variables based on the context. This enables Julia to achieve high performance while still providing the flexibility of dynamic typing.

  4. Performance: Elixir is known for its robustness and fault-tolerant systems, but it may not be as performant as Julia when it comes to numerical computations. Julia is built with a focus on performance and aims to provide a performance level comparable to low-level languages like C and Fortran. Julia achieves this through its efficient just-in-time (JIT) compilation and specialization techniques.

  5. Ecosystem and Libraries: Elixir has a thriving ecosystem with a wide range of libraries and frameworks for web development, concurrency, and distributed systems. It is well-suited for building scalable and fault-tolerant applications. Julia, on the other hand, has a growing ecosystem primarily focused on numerical and scientific computing. It provides an extensive collection of libraries and packages for tasks such as linear algebra, optimization, data analysis, and visualization.

  6. Community and Adoption: Elixir has gained popularity in recent years, especially in the web development community, thanks to its productivity and scalability. It has a vibrant and active community that contributes to its development and provides support to users. Julia, on the other hand, is still relatively new compared to Elixir, but it has been steadily gaining traction in the scientific computing and data analysis communities. Its community is actively working on expanding the language's capabilities and optimizing its performance.

In summary, Elixir is a dynamic, functional programming language known for its scalability and fault-tolerant systems, while Julia is a high-performance programming language designed specifically for numerical and scientific computing tasks. Elixir provides a powerful concurrency model and has a thriving web development ecosystem, while Julia focuses on performance and offers a wide range of libraries for scientific computing. Both languages have growing communities and are gaining adoption in their respective domains.

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Advice on Elixir, Julia

Timm
Timm

VP Of Engineering at Flexperto GmbH

Nov 10, 2020

Decided

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.

682k views682k
Comments
Jakes
Jakes

Mar 21, 2021

Decided

#rust @{#elixir}|topic:null| 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

284k views284k
Comments
Alexander
Alexander

Senior researcher at MIPT

Oct 27, 2020

Decided

After writing a project in Julia we decided to stick with Kotlin. Julia is a nice language and has superb REPL support, but poor tooling and the lack of reproducibility of the program runs makes it too expensive to work with. Kotlin on the other hand now has nice Jupyter support, which mostly covers REPL requirements.

188k views188k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Elixir
Elixir
Julia
Julia

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.

Julia is a high-level, high-performance dynamic programming language for technical computing, with syntax that is familiar to users of other technical computing environments. It provides a sophisticated compiler, distributed parallel execution, numerical accuracy, and an extensive mathematical function library.

Statistics
GitHub Stars
26.0K
GitHub Stars
47.9K
GitHub Forks
3.5K
GitHub Forks
5.7K
Stacks
3.5K
Stacks
666
Followers
3.3K
Followers
677
Votes
1.3K
Votes
171
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 174
    Concurrency
  • 163
    Functional
  • 133
    Erlang vm
  • 113
    Great documentation
  • 105
    Great tooling
Cons
  • 11
    Fewer jobs for Elixir experts
  • 7
    Smaller userbase than other mainstream languages
  • 5
    Elixir's dot notation less readable ("object": 1st arg)
  • 4
    Dynamic typing
  • 2
    Difficult to understand
Pros
  • 25
    Fast Performance and Easy Experimentation
  • 22
    Designed for parallelism and distributed computation
  • 19
    Free and Open Source
  • 17
    Calling C functions directly
  • 17
    Dynamic Type System
Cons
  • 5
    Immature library management system
  • 4
    Slow program start
  • 3
    Poor backwards compatibility
  • 3
    JIT compiler is very slow
  • 2
    No static compilation
Integrations
No integrations available
GitHub
GitHub
Azure Web App for Containers
Azure Web App for Containers
GitLab
GitLab
Slack
Slack
C++
C++
Rust
Rust
C lang
C lang
Stack Overflow
Stack Overflow
vscode.dev
vscode.dev
Python
Python

What are some alternatives to Elixir, Julia?

JavaScript

JavaScript

JavaScript is most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic,and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.

Python

Python

Python is a general purpose programming language created by Guido Van Rossum. Python is most praised for its elegant syntax and readable code, if you are just beginning your programming career python suits you best.

PHP

PHP

Fast, flexible and pragmatic, PHP powers everything from your blog to the most popular websites in the world.

Ruby

Ruby

Ruby is a language of careful balance. Its creator, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, blended parts of his favorite languages (Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp) to form a new language that balanced functional programming with imperative programming.

Java

Java

Java is a programming language and computing platform first released by Sun Microsystems in 1995. There are lots of applications and websites that will not work unless you have Java installed, and more are created every day. Java is fast, secure, and reliable. From laptops to datacenters, game consoles to scientific supercomputers, cell phones to the Internet, Java is everywhere!

Golang

Golang

Go is expressive, concise, clean, and efficient. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel type system enables flexible and modular program construction. Go compiles quickly to machine code yet has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. It's a fast, statically typed, compiled language that feels like a dynamically typed, interpreted language.

HTML5

HTML5

HTML5 is a core technology markup language of the Internet used for structuring and presenting content for the World Wide Web. As of October 2014 this is the final and complete fifth revision of the HTML standard of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The previous version, HTML 4, was standardised in 1997.

C#

C#

C# (pronounced "See Sharp") is a simple, modern, object-oriented, and type-safe programming language. C# has its roots in the C family of languages and will be immediately familiar to C, C++, Java, and JavaScript programmers.

Meteor

Meteor

A Meteor application is a mix of JavaScript that runs inside a client web browser, JavaScript that runs on the Meteor server inside a Node.js container, and all the supporting HTML fragments, CSS rules, and static assets.

Scala

Scala

Scala is an acronym for “Scalable Language”. This means that Scala grows with you. You can play with it by typing one-line expressions and observing the results. But you can also rely on it for large mission critical systems, as many companies, including Twitter, LinkedIn, or Intel do. To some, Scala feels like a scripting language. Its syntax is concise and low ceremony; its types get out of the way because the compiler can infer them.

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