Comment by notemaker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by notemaker | Hacker News Reader

This is a great talk that answers many of your questions, https://youtu.be/JvBT4XBdoUE

I am so far merely an enthused observer, so I can't give any insights into the experience of delivering business software with it. Here's my observations though

- Engineers that work with this stack love it. The two most common issues I've seen are lack of static typing and difficulty in hiring

- Great for IO bound tasks due to collaborative scheduling. For CPU bound tasks performance is better offloaded to e.g Rust (see rustler)

- Exception handling is done by processes having supervisors. My mental model for this is similar to pods & deployments à la K8s, but at any abstraction level you want inside your component.

- Elixir pleases many crowds: ruby, FP, performance, resilience

- Phoenix (an elixir library) is seen as a next step from ruby on rails.

- Concurrency model is considered to be simple & powerful

Big thanks for the reply

> Great for IO bound tasks due to collaborative scheduling

Right, so this seems similar-ish to Loom in Java, Coroutines in Kotlin etc, ie Erlang and Elixir have already had for a long time and fully utilized by default this concept which is only recently making it into many other languages?

> Exception handling is done by processes having supervisors. My mental model for this is similar to pods & deployments à la K8s, but at any abstraction level you want inside your component.

Right, based on this and what others are saying about the same thing, basically Erlang and Elixir have already had for a long time and fully utilized by default this concept which other languages don't really have natively but instead rely on external cloud infra to provide?

In any case I guess my question is if you're eg experiencing a timeout because your code is calling another service that isn't responding, you can shut down that calling process and restart it all you want, it's not going to really fix the problem, you still need to address why that other service isn't responding? (though it may prevent the VM from being eaten up exclusively by waiting for responses that will never come - is that the idea?)

Hiring isn’t really that bad. Definitely fewer candidates, but they tend to be higher quality.

My company uses Elixir exclusively in the backend and we just hire solid backend developers, and teach them to use Elixir. That's how I was a couple of years ago. The learning curve is pretty gentle.

satvikpendem already linked that talk (see other comment)

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