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Comment by blackrock | Hacker News Reader

It seems that Elixir would be a perfect platform for Artificial Intelligence programming.

Since Elixir is used for (1) functional programming, and (2) it uses Erlang's OTP Server for massive parallelization.

But, I don't seem much activity in this space. What is the probability that Elixir will emerge as the "killer app" for AI development?

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The problem is that BEAM wasn't built to excel at number crunching or doing computationally expensive work. A good explanation here https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11214336/what-makes-erla...

But I've been reading a lot about this topic too. There are a lot of people out there doing exploratory work to see if Elixir can be a viable solution.

There is already some work out there since Elixir lends perfectly for parallelization of computation and is also immutable. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YE0h9DURSOo and http://www.automatingthefuture.com/blog/2016/9/7/artificial-...

It won't never be even close to native code because of the BEAM overhead, lack of typing, memory layout. It is suited for concurrency not computationally intensive workloads. Not to mention the use of gpus.

There’s the 2012 or 2013 book by Gene Sher, “Handbook of Neuroevolution Through Erlang”. I was working on writing some of the code in Elixir to learn Elixir, but gave up due to inexperience and I lost my interest in Elixir when the Erlang code resonated more with me.

Elixir is suited for reliable and fast servers, not computing workloads... It could control other processes but it could hardly compete with native ML libraries. Also calling foreign code from Elixir messes with the beam scheduled if it takes more than a couple millis

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