programming-phoenix-liveview VS eqwalizer

Read and watch tutorials: Thinking Elixir - a podcast that explores different aspects of the Elixir programming language: https://thinkingelixir.com/ Learn Elixir - a free interactive tutorial that teaches Elixir from scratch: https://www.learnelixir.tv/ Programming Phoenix LiveView - a book that teaches how to build web applications in Elixir using the Phoenix framework https://pragprog.com/titles/liveview/programming-phoenix-liveview/

A good project based book that goes pretty in depth is: https://pragprog.com/titles/liveview/programming-phoenix-liv...

LiveView is evolving into a great piece of tech, but as others have noted elsewhere in the comments one of the challenging parts with LiveView right now (and to an extent Phoenix) is the outdated books & tutorials.

Bruce Tate and Sophie DeBenedetto have been authoring the book “Programming Phoenix LiveView” (https://pragprog.com/titles/liveview/programming-phoenix-liv...) which has the potential to be a great source for people that want to really dive into LiveView. The challenge though is they have not updated it to support the changes introduced in 0.18.0 which makes it really hard to start using the book when a new Phoenix application “mix phx.new dev_app” looks different than what’s in their book and some of their code breaks with the default installed versions of included plugs.

While I wish the book would receive an update sooner that brings it back to a compatible state (meaning there are no issues following along with the book), the good news is they have committed to having the book be updated when LiveView hits 1.0.

I suggest cloning down an actual LiveView project (maybe this one?) and making changes to it. That will help you get a grip on things more easily than trying to build something from scratch right away.

I don't think the implementation itself is at fault, but yes, I do think that the design of dialyzer makes it an (at times) faulty type checker. The unfortunate reality of a type checker that fails sometimes is that it makes it mostly useless because you can never trust that it'll do the job.

To be clear, I've had it fail in a function where I've literally specced that very function to return a `binary` but I'm returning an `integer` in one of the cases. This is a very shallow context but it can still fail. Now add more functions, maybe one more `case`.

I think an entire rethink of type checking on the BEAM had to be done and that's why eqWalizer[0] was created and why Elixir is looking to add an actual sound, well-developed type checker. Gleam[1] I would assume is just a Hindley-Milner system so that's completely solid. `purerl`[2] is just PureScript for the BEAM so that's also Hindley-Milner, meaning it's solid. `purerl` has some performance issues caused by it compiling down to closures everywhere but if you can pay that cost it's actually pretty fantastic. With that said my bet for the best statically typed experience right now on the BEAM would be `gleam`.

0 - https://github.com/WhatsApp/eqwalizer

1 - https://gleam.run

2 - https://github.com/purerl/purerl

While it's not static-typing, compile-time type checking for Erlang have come a long way: Eqwalizer works pretty well - but I may be biased since my employer sponsors the project.

1. https://github.com/WhatsApp/eqwalizer

Note there is also research happening in this area by the Elixir team. The WhatsApp is also working on static types for Erlang, which I am certain will be available for Elixir too at some point.

From the discord blog posts it seems that elixir powers the chat system, with rust and python as the other two main languages in their stack.

As for whatsapp, they are mainly a erlang shop and yesterday they open sourced a type checker for erlang:

https://github.com/WhatsApp/eqwalizer