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You can actually have "background jobs" in very different ways in Elixir.
> I want background work to live on different compute capacity than http requests, both because they have very different resources usage
In Elixir, because of the way the BEAM works (the unit of parallelism is much cheaper and consume a low amount of memory), "incoming http requests" and related "workers" are not as expensive (a lot less actually) compared to other stacks (for instance Ruby and Python), where it is quite critical to release "http workers" and not hold the connection (which is what lead to the creation of background job tools like Resque, DelayedJob, Sidekiq, Celery...).
This means that you can actually hold incoming HTTP connections a lot longer without troubles.
A consequence of this is that implementing "reverse proxies", or anything calling third party servers _right in the middle_ of your own HTTP call, is usually perfectly acceptable (something I've done more than a couple of times, the latest one powering the reverse proxy behind https://transport.data.gouv.fr - code available at https://github.com/etalab/transport-site/tree/master/apps/un...).
As a consequence, what would be a bad pattern in Python or Ruby (holding the incoming HTTP connection) is not a problem with Elixir.
> because I want to have state or queues in front of background work so there's a well-defined process for retry, error handling, and back-pressure.
Unless you deal with immediate stuff like reverse proxying or cheap "one off async tasks" (like recording a metric), there also are solutions to have more "stateful" background works in Elixir, too.
A popular background job queue is https://github.com/sorentwo/oban (roughly similar to Sidekiq at al), which uses Postgres.
It handles retries, errors etc.
But it's not the only solution, as you have other tools dedicated to processing, such as Broadway (https://github.com/dashbitco/broadway), which handles back-pressure, fault-tolerance, batching etc natively.
You also have more simple options, such as flow (https://github.com/dashbitco/flow), gen_stage (https://github.com/elixir-lang/gen_stage), Task.async_stream (https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/1.12/Task.html#async_stream/5) etc.
It allows to use the "right tool for the job" quite easily.
It is also interesting to note there is no need to "go evented" if you need to fetch data from multiple HTTP servers: it can happen in the exact same process (even: in a background task attached to your HTTP server), as done here https://transport.data.gouv.fr/explore (if you zoom you will see vehicle moving in realtime, and ~80 data sources are being polled every 10 seconds & broadcasted to the visitors via pubsub & websockets).
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
You can actually have "background jobs" in very different ways in Elixir.
> I want background work to live on different compute capacity than http requests, both because they have very different resources usage
In Elixir, because of the way the BEAM works (the unit of parallelism is much cheaper and consume a low amount of memory), "incoming http requests" and related "workers" are not as expensive (a lot less actually) compared to other stacks (for instance Ruby and Python), where it is quite critical to release "http workers" and not hold the connection (which is what lead to the creation of background job tools like Resque, DelayedJob, Sidekiq, Celery...).
This means that you can actually hold incoming HTTP connections a lot longer without troubles.
A consequence of this is that implementing "reverse proxies", or anything calling third party servers _right in the middle_ of your own HTTP call, is usually perfectly acceptable (something I've done more than a couple of times, the latest one powering the reverse proxy behind https://transport.data.gouv.fr - code available at https://github.com/etalab/transport-site/tree/master/apps/un...).
As a consequence, what would be a bad pattern in Python or Ruby (holding the incoming HTTP connection) is not a problem with Elixir.
> because I want to have state or queues in front of background work so there's a well-defined process for retry, error handling, and back-pressure.
Unless you deal with immediate stuff like reverse proxying or cheap "one off async tasks" (like recording a metric), there also are solutions to have more "stateful" background works in Elixir, too.
A popular background job queue is https://github.com/sorentwo/oban (roughly similar to Sidekiq at al), which uses Postgres.
It handles retries, errors etc.
But it's not the only solution, as you have other tools dedicated to processing, such as Broadway (https://github.com/dashbitco/broadway), which handles back-pressure, fault-tolerance, batching etc natively.
You also have more simple options, such as flow (https://github.com/dashbitco/flow), gen_stage (https://github.com/elixir-lang/gen_stage), Task.async_stream (https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/1.12/Task.html#async_stream/5) etc.
It allows to use the "right tool for the job" quite easily.
It is also interesting to note there is no need to "go evented" if you need to fetch data from multiple HTTP servers: it can happen in the exact same process (even: in a background task attached to your HTTP server), as done here https://transport.data.gouv.fr/explore (if you zoom you will see vehicle moving in realtime, and ~80 data sources are being polled every 10 seconds & broadcasted to the visitors via pubsub & websockets).
You can actually have "background jobs" in very different ways in Elixir.
> I want background work to live on different compute capacity than http requests, both because they have very different resources usage
In Elixir, because of the way the BEAM works (the unit of parallelism is much cheaper and consume a low amount of memory), "incoming http requests" and related "workers" are not as expensive (a lot less actually) compared to other stacks (for instance Ruby and Python), where it is quite critical to release "http workers" and not hold the connection (which is what lead to the creation of background job tools like Resque, DelayedJob, Sidekiq, Celery...).
This means that you can actually hold incoming HTTP connections a lot longer without troubles.
A consequence of this is that implementing "reverse proxies", or anything calling third party servers _right in the middle_ of your own HTTP call, is usually perfectly acceptable (something I've done more than a couple of times, the latest one powering the reverse proxy behind https://transport.data.gouv.fr - code available at https://github.com/etalab/transport-site/tree/master/apps/un...).
As a consequence, what would be a bad pattern in Python or Ruby (holding the incoming HTTP connection) is not a problem with Elixir.
> because I want to have state or queues in front of background work so there's a well-defined process for retry, error handling, and back-pressure.
Unless you deal with immediate stuff like reverse proxying or cheap "one off async tasks" (like recording a metric), there also are solutions to have more "stateful" background works in Elixir, too.
A popular background job queue is https://github.com/sorentwo/oban (roughly similar to Sidekiq at al), which uses Postgres.
It handles retries, errors etc.
But it's not the only solution, as you have other tools dedicated to processing, such as Broadway (https://github.com/dashbitco/broadway), which handles back-pressure, fault-tolerance, batching etc natively.
You also have more simple options, such as flow (https://github.com/dashbitco/flow), gen_stage (https://github.com/elixir-lang/gen_stage), Task.async_stream (https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/1.12/Task.html#async_stream/5) etc.
It allows to use the "right tool for the job" quite easily.
It is also interesting to note there is no need to "go evented" if you need to fetch data from multiple HTTP servers: it can happen in the exact same process (even: in a background task attached to your HTTP server), as done here https://transport.data.gouv.fr/explore (if you zoom you will see vehicle moving in realtime, and ~80 data sources are being polled every 10 seconds & broadcasted to the visitors via pubsub & websockets).
You can actually have "background jobs" in very different ways in Elixir.
> I want background work to live on different compute capacity than http requests, both because they have very different resources usage
In Elixir, because of the way the BEAM works (the unit of parallelism is much cheaper and consume a low amount of memory), "incoming http requests" and related "workers" are not as expensive (a lot less actually) compared to other stacks (for instance Ruby and Python), where it is quite critical to release "http workers" and not hold the connection (which is what lead to the creation of background job tools like Resque, DelayedJob, Sidekiq, Celery...).
This means that you can actually hold incoming HTTP connections a lot longer without troubles.
A consequence of this is that implementing "reverse proxies", or anything calling third party servers _right in the middle_ of your own HTTP call, is usually perfectly acceptable (something I've done more than a couple of times, the latest one powering the reverse proxy behind https://transport.data.gouv.fr - code available at https://github.com/etalab/transport-site/tree/master/apps/un...).
As a consequence, what would be a bad pattern in Python or Ruby (holding the incoming HTTP connection) is not a problem with Elixir.
> because I want to have state or queues in front of background work so there's a well-defined process for retry, error handling, and back-pressure.
Unless you deal with immediate stuff like reverse proxying or cheap "one off async tasks" (like recording a metric), there also are solutions to have more "stateful" background works in Elixir, too.
A popular background job queue is https://github.com/sorentwo/oban (roughly similar to Sidekiq at al), which uses Postgres.
It handles retries, errors etc.
But it's not the only solution, as you have other tools dedicated to processing, such as Broadway (https://github.com/dashbitco/broadway), which handles back-pressure, fault-tolerance, batching etc natively.
You also have more simple options, such as flow (https://github.com/dashbitco/flow), gen_stage (https://github.com/elixir-lang/gen_stage), Task.async_stream (https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/1.12/Task.html#async_stream/5) etc.
It allows to use the "right tool for the job" quite easily.
It is also interesting to note there is no need to "go evented" if you need to fetch data from multiple HTTP servers: it can happen in the exact same process (even: in a background task attached to your HTTP server), as done here https://transport.data.gouv.fr/explore (if you zoom you will see vehicle moving in realtime, and ~80 data sources are being polled every 10 seconds & broadcasted to the visitors via pubsub & websockets).
You can actually have "background jobs" in very different ways in Elixir.
> I want background work to live on different compute capacity than http requests, both because they have very different resources usage
In Elixir, because of the way the BEAM works (the unit of parallelism is much cheaper and consume a low amount of memory), "incoming http requests" and related "workers" are not as expensive (a lot less actually) compared to other stacks (for instance Ruby and Python), where it is quite critical to release "http workers" and not hold the connection (which is what lead to the creation of background job tools like Resque, DelayedJob, Sidekiq, Celery...).
This means that you can actually hold incoming HTTP connections a lot longer without troubles.
A consequence of this is that implementing "reverse proxies", or anything calling third party servers _right in the middle_ of your own HTTP call, is usually perfectly acceptable (something I've done more than a couple of times, the latest one powering the reverse proxy behind https://transport.data.gouv.fr - code available at https://github.com/etalab/transport-site/tree/master/apps/un...).
As a consequence, what would be a bad pattern in Python or Ruby (holding the incoming HTTP connection) is not a problem with Elixir.
> because I want to have state or queues in front of background work so there's a well-defined process for retry, error handling, and back-pressure.
Unless you deal with immediate stuff like reverse proxying or cheap "one off async tasks" (like recording a metric), there also are solutions to have more "stateful" background works in Elixir, too.
A popular background job queue is https://github.com/sorentwo/oban (roughly similar to Sidekiq at al), which uses Postgres.
It handles retries, errors etc.
But it's not the only solution, as you have other tools dedicated to processing, such as Broadway (https://github.com/dashbitco/broadway), which handles back-pressure, fault-tolerance, batching etc natively.
You also have more simple options, such as flow (https://github.com/dashbitco/flow), gen_stage (https://github.com/elixir-lang/gen_stage), Task.async_stream (https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/1.12/Task.html#async_stream/5) etc.
It allows to use the "right tool for the job" quite easily.
It is also interesting to note there is no need to "go evented" if you need to fetch data from multiple HTTP servers: it can happen in the exact same process (even: in a background task attached to your HTTP server), as done here https://transport.data.gouv.fr/explore (if you zoom you will see vehicle moving in realtime, and ~80 data sources are being polled every 10 seconds & broadcasted to the visitors via pubsub & websockets).
Self promotion moment:
If you enjoy the Result/Either type and API in Rust, I made this project just for this: https://github.com/linkdd/rustic_result
I also made https://github.com/linkdd/rustic_maybe/tree/main for an Option/Maybe type.
NB: Those are not types, but I'm waiting for set theoretic types to update those libs :)
Self promotion moment:
If you enjoy the Result/Either type and API in Rust, I made this project just for this: https://github.com/linkdd/rustic_result
I also made https://github.com/linkdd/rustic_maybe/tree/main for an Option/Maybe type.
NB: Those are not types, but I'm waiting for set theoretic types to update those libs :)
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