burrito VS Phoenix

Most of the BEAM isn't well-suited for trends in today's immutable architecture world (Docker deploys on something like Kubernetes or ECS). Bootup time on the VM can be long compared to running a Go or OCaml binary, or some Python applications (I find larger Python apps tend to spend a ton of time loading modules). Compile times aren't as fast as Go, so if a fresh deploy requires downloading modules and compile-from-scratch, that'll be longer than other stacks. Now, if you use stateful deploys and hot-code reloading, it's not so bad, but incorporating that involves a bit more risk and specific expertise that most companies don't want to roll into. Basically, the opposite of this article https://ferd.ca/a-pipeline-made-of-airbags.html

Macros are neat but they can really mess up your compile times, and they don't compose well (e.g. ExConstructor and typed_struct and Ecto Schemas all operate on Elixir Structs, but you can't use all three)

If your problem is CPU-bound, there are much better choices: C++, Rust, C. Python has a million libraries that use great FFI so you'll be fine using that too. Ditto memory-bound: there are better languages for this.

This is also not borne from direct experience, but: my understanding is the JVM has a lot more knobs to tune GC. The BEAM GC is IMO amazing, and did the right thing from the beginning to prevent stop-the-world pauses, but if you care about other metrics (good list in this article https://blog.plan99.net/modern-garbage-collection-911ef4f8bd...) you're probably better off with a JVM language.

While the BEAM is great at distribution, "distributed Erlang" (using the VM's features instead of what most companies do, and ad-hoc it with containers and infra) makes assumptions that you can't break, like default k-clustering (one node must be connected to all other nodes). This means you can distribute to some number of nodes, but it's hard to use Distributed Erlang for hundreds or thousands of nodes.

Deployment can be mixed, depending on what you want. BEAM Releases are nice but the lack some of the niceness of direct binaries. Libraries can work around this (like Burrito https://github.com/burrito-elixir/burrito).

If you like static types, Dialyzer is the worst of the "bolted-on" type checkers. mypy/pyright/pyre, Sorbet, Typescript are all way better, since Dialyzer only does "success typing," and gives way worse messages.

   [1]: https://morepablo.com/2023/05/where-have-all-the-hackers-gone.html

The answer was given by the Elixir community with burrito which enables users to pack up everything an Elixir application needs within a binary namely Zig Archiver to package the binary and Zig Wrapper that wraps the Erlang Virtual Machine to be used in multiple platforms (Zig + Rust in the same project 🤯).

Might be worth looking into burrito for that use case?

Elixir is extremely practical for building systems, I know some sysadmin/devops that write their tools in it - which is maybe a bit of a leap for most. It has better support for cli stuff these days but it's not it's strong suit - you can create single-bin packages with stuff like https://github.com/burrito-elixir/burrito or regular "mix releases". (LiveView is very sexy.) It's not statically typed. There is some experimental skunkworks project to add typing to it but probably wont see any public preview until mid/late next year as I understand it.

I would consider 1 to be the major blocker but Burrito has addressed many of the concerns here, including cross-compilation. The only downside of Burrito is that the first boot has to unpack the runtime (which is sub-second in my experience).

Sure! Elixir's been great. Phoenix is a joy to work with, and many of the concurrency primitives built into OTP make it the perfect foundation for a product like this. And rustler makes it super easy to add low-level / native code.

I will say the big downside to using Elixir is that distributing releases is a bit cumbersome. `mix release` expects that you're building on the same OS / version as you'll be running on, though we're looking into using something like burrito [1] aim to alleviate this.

[1] https://github.com/burrito-elixir/burrito

I was intrigued so I went to hunt for the Burrito repo [1].

I thought it was some sort of Erlang native compiler written in Zig (which sounds like an incredible pain in the ass), but it's really "just" a cross-platform installer. Still useful !

[1]: https://github.com/burrito-elixir/burrito/issues?q=is%3Aissu...

A standard Phoenix app contains a priv/repo/seeds.exs script file, which populates a database when it is run, so that developers can work with a conveniently prepared environment.

There was one in the Phoenix Framework (Elixir) about issuing certificates with an invalid end date: https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix/issues/5737

Interestingly, Azure had this bug some years ago too leading to an outage. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/summary-of-windows-az...

Official website: https://www.phoenixframework.org/

Since you mention Rails, have you seen https://www.phoenixframework.org/

Thus, we set out to build a desktop application using a LiveView from the Phoenix Framework in Elixir. For the uninitiated, a LiveView is a process that receives events, updates its state, and renders updates to a page as diffs. The LiveView programming model is declarative: instead of saying “once event X happens, change Y on the page”, events in LiveView are regular messages which may cause changes to its state.

It seems though like Phoenix is similar like Blazor Server (using web socket), but Phoenix is: SEO friendly (first render is plain html) Light weight, scales well and concurrency is first class Easy to develop (runs a local server so you see live updates) Compiled With auth out of the box https://www.phoenixframework.org/

Sorry to hear this. Phoenix v1.7 changed how it structures files in disk and that broke quite some of the getting started material. However, the guides are always kept up to date, so you can give it a try: https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix/overview.html

You can also see the resources on this page listed by year: https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix/blob/main/guides... - the recent launched ones are most likely up to date.

Yes! I love Elixir :) [Phoenix LiveView](https://www.phoenixframework.org/) is really amazing. I feel so fast working in it. I got hooked after watching Chris McCord's ['Build a real-time Twitter clone in 15 minutes'](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZvmYaFkNJI&embeds_referring...), and things have improved a lot since then.

I still work on a lot of Java projects. As of JDK 17 Java has most of "ML the good parts" and has the same scalable, reliable and high-performance threading Java is famous for. JAX-RS provides a Sinatra style framework that makes it easy to write JSON API back ends. JDK 21 is just about to come out as a long term supported version and it will be even better.

I do my side projects in Python with aiohttp and think it is a lot of fun even though people tell me it is suicide (I guess if you block the thread you are in trouble)

I think "Next.js" really wants a node.js backend which has the big advantage that you can share code with the front end and back end. It's basically single-threaded but I know people who are happy with it.

The system I'd most like to try is

https://www.phoenixframework.org/

which is just great if you want to do stuff with websockets that is more interactive than what most people are doing.