A guide on how to use Ranch with Elixir | Hacker News Reader

A guide on how to use Ranch with Elixir

github.com

24 pointscarlosfritz5 comments

Definitely agree some of the "using erlang libraries in Elixir" guides on the internet are 10/10 confusing. It'll be good to have this as a resource on Google in the future! I spent quite awhile figuring out how to implement a SSL TCP server, with PSK and only a subset of cipher suites... a good long while.

Also related, I really like the `active` (GenServer example in this post) socket approach because then you're just writing a TCP server that acts like any erlang message provider. Of course there's some difficulties related to that but it makes the code very straightforward to understand and manage.

Ranch is a wonderful library. Also, since I'm self learning erlang and elixir and don't have senior level colleagues for feedback, i learned a bunch about erlang program design reading this developers code.

Now that I'm thinking about reading erlang code, i just realized that erlang is a remarkabky easy language to read because of common system design principles governed by the otp standard. And what a treat that is, since the code i write id prefer to be optimized for the read-path. After all, code is written once and read many.

ThousandIsland is worth checking out as well: https://github.com/mtrudel/thousand_island

I've been reading Joe Armstrong's thesis[0] for a little while and I continue to find a deeper appreciation for erlang and the OTP application OS they built. It's amazing how many concepts from telecom systems directly apply to the type of web systems we're building today. I still find the erlang syntax slightly jarring, but the thesis is really helping me understand the why.

[0] - https://erlang.org/download/armstrong_thesis_2003.pdf

Some months ago I needed to implement a basic tcp server in elixir using gen_tcp. I came out with this https://github.com/spapas/tcp-elixir. I'd be grateful if people could take a look at (it's really simple) and point me at any improvements it needs. It doesn't use ranch for accepting connections, what would be the advantage of using ranch in my case?

Thank you

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