component VS Rustler

* Lifecycle management: Mount, Integrant or Component (https://github.com/tolitius/mount https://github.com/weavejester/integrant and https://github.com/stuartsierra/component)

When you start to have multiple stateful components (the database, the HTTP server, your Redis connection, a page cache, etc.), then you'll want to use a library like component that manages their (inter-)dependencies and provides a consistent notion of lifecycle.

Today I released a new version of Reveal Pro — dev.vlaaad/reveal-pro {:mvn/version "1.3.308"} — that adds sticker integration for system libraries such as mount, component and integrant!

I agree with the main sentiment from the article. Although I do think they are discussing Inversion of control more-so than dependency injection.

One of my first languages was .net and I was never able to really understand DI in that context that well.

Actually using javascript and ducktyping made me understand what it actually was.

I remember a .net job interview where I had to write a micro-service and opted to construct the dependency graph in the main function initialising "all" the classes there. Instead of discussing the pro's and con's of that approach they berated me for not using a DI framework (No I did not land that job, but in hindsight it was the most expensive job interview I've ever had. The room was filled with 8 developers going over my code).

The main thing the article glosses over is state. something people with a functional background hide from. But if you look at something like the httpclient in .net. I think it took the .net world like 10 years to start using the httpclient properly. Scope and lifetime of those kind of objects are important. managing connection pools, retry state, throttling or the incoming http request. DI does make that kind of thing easieR (I'm not saying it makes it better)

Look at clojure's component(https://github.com/stuartsierra/component), I'm not a clojure expert by far. But it is kinda DI/IOC in a functional language.

In closing we can agree that it is underused in the right places and overused in the wrong ones.

https://github.com/stuartsierra/component#no-function-should-take-the-entire-system-as-an-argument

Yeah like I mentioned I'm not like super sold on the everything-should-be-an-actor paradigm, but I find value in DDD + a light implementation of Components (similar to stuartsierra/component).

https://github.com/stuartsierra/component for managing components lifecycles in projects

For performance intensive tasks, you could rely on Rust NIFs, there is this great project: https://github.com/rusterlium/rustler

My last project with Elixir was using Elixir merely as an orchestrator of static binaries (developed in golang) which were talking in JSON via stdin/stdout.

From the moment we discovered Tauri, we really felt like this was the perfect fit. The API is really solid, the configuration files are minimal and easy to understand, and the usage of Rust makes it way easier to add new functionalities and think about interesting ways of interoperating with Elixir via the Rustler library.

Elixir/Rust is the new Python/C++, and Rustler makes the communicating between the 2 languages super easy: https://github.com/rusterlium/rustler

Rustler is so awesome for this. Write Elixir NIFs in Rust? Yes, please!

But really, I would suggest thinking about what you want to build before "how" or "with which tool" - one of the signs of a person becoming a good engineer is having an array of tools at their disposal and being able to choose a correct tool for the correct task. Rust also excels in integrating with other languages - with JS via WebAssembly (a bit of self-promotion, for example), with Elixir via Rustler, with Python via PyO3 and PyOxidizer, etc. So you absolutely can start writing a frontend app with JS, or a distributed system with Elixir, or a data processing/ML app with Python and use Rust to speed up critical parts of those. Or, in reverse, you can start with Rust & add new capabilities to whatever you're building, that being a frontend, a resilient chat interface, or an ML model.

I created a elixir (wrapper) library to generate password hashes. Other Elixir libraries use a C NIF to generate password hashes. This libary uses a Rust NIF (using Rustler) and the Rust libraries the generate the different hashes. Additionally this library uses RustlerPrecompiled so you don't need to have a Rust compiler installed to use this library. It supports argon2, scrypt, brypt and pbkdf2.

> I guess, why not use Rust entirely instead of as a FFI into Elixir or other backend language?

Because Rust brings none of the benefits of the BEAM ecosystem to the table.

I was an early Elixir adopter, not working currently as an Elixir developer, but I have deployed one of the largest Elixir applications for a private company in my country.

I know it has limits, but the language itself is only a small part of the whole.

Take ML, Jose Valim and Sean Moriarity have studied the problem, made a plan to tackle it and started solving it piece by piece [1] in a tightly integrated manner, it feels natural, as if Elixir always had those capabilities in a way that no other language does and to put the icing on the cake the community released Livebook [2] to interactively explore code and use the new tools in the simplest way possible, something that Python notebooks only dream of being capable of, after a decade of progress

That's not to say that Elixir is superior as a language, but that the ecosystem is flourishing and the community is able to extract the 100% of the benefits from the tools and create new marvellously crafted ones, that push the limits forward every time, in such a simple manner, that it looks like magic.

And going back to Rust, you can write Rust if you need speed or for whatever reason you feel it's the right tool for the job, it's totally integrated [3][4], again in a way that many other languages can only dream of, and it's in fact the reason I've learned Rust in the first place.

The opposite is not true, if you write Rust, you write Rust, and that's it. You can't take advantage of the many features the BEAM offers, OTP, hot code reloading, full inspection of running systems, distribution, scalability, fault tolerance, soft real time etc. etc. etc.

But of course if you don't see any advantage in them, it means you probably don't need them (one other option is that you still don't know you want them :] ). In that case Rust is as good as any other language, but for a backend, even though I gently despise it, Java (or Kotlin) might be a better option.

[1] https://github.com/elixir-nx/nx https://github.com/elixir-nx/axon

[2] https://livebook.dev/

[3] https://github.com/rusterlium/rustler

[4] https://dashbit.co/blog/rustler-precompiled

unfortunately as of the time of this writing, rustler does not support generic type intefaces so I guess this is impossible?

One thing that drew me to Rust was actually Elixir/Erlang calling out to it for certain specialized needs. Within Elixir/Erlang you get best of breed concurrency but exiting the BEAM to run other code is unsafe. Calling out to Rust, however, comes with great safety guarantees.

Managing concurrency outside of Rust and then calling Rust for the more focused and specialized work is a good combination IMO.

https://github.com/rusterlium/rustler