The Soul of Erlang and Elixir • Sasa Juric • GOTO 2019

Check out this presentation :) "The Soul of Erlang and Elixir by Sasa Juric" Really one of the best presentations to show what you may get out of adopting Elixir. ▶ this video

From the author of this post, here's one of the best demos of Elixir, Erlang and modern distributed computing in general: "The Soul of Erlang and Elixir • Saša Jurić • GOTO 2019" - ▶ this video When you feel sufficiently amazed by this demo, I also recommend the Elixir in Action book, by this same author, to get started with this incredible ecosystem and paradigm. --- It's hard to imagine a better platform than Erlang's for writing distributed and networked systems of any kind. I fell in love with Elixir in 2016 and have been using it full time since, first adopting as CTO in my previous company, now powering my new solo business. It's such a good language, with great community and stewardship, running on a rock solid platform that's so advanced compared to most popular languages today. Erlang was created 38 years ago, and it's good to see the ideas of Armstrong, Virding and Williams to be vindicated today. They simply were too far ahead of their time.

Almost no business application is written for performance at raw request speed. What Elixir brings is far more the that. Watch this if you want to understand why so many people fall in love with it. ▶ this video

I would find a list of good talks much more useful. For example, 'The Soul of Erlang and Elixir' talk by Sasa Juric [1] really sold me on Elixir. [1] ▶ this video

> [and particularly, videos] go out of their way to discuss how process management and IPC communication works After watching a bunch of videos on BEAM/erlang/elixir I came to the conclusion that it isn't a platform for computation, it's a platform for communication. The best video (by far) was The Soul of Erlang and Elixir • Saša Jurić ▶ this video Two shallow benchmarks: link link (phoenix is at 175)

I replaced a python/uwsgi stateless stack with an elixir stateful system. Flipped it over and it worked flawlessly, and hasn't died once in several months of operation. Latencies are way down, and operation of it is simpler. Full deploy to the head node is one command, not an ansible script. I guess part of it is that I'm lazy and haven't learned supervisor strategies like kubernetes (the place I work doesn't deploy kubernetes anyways) This video is instrumental in giving me the confidence to do what I did: ▶ this video

> explore Go or Elixir I have never seen a good argument for using golang for business logic. If you are writing the actual server then sure, use golang. If you are writing some high-speed network interconnect, use golang. Some crazy caching system, sure use golang. The public WS endpoint, use golang. But if you need to access a DB with golang for anything more than, like, a session token, then you made the wrong choice and you need to go back and re-assess. Elixir is in the "germination phase" and I predict massive adoption in the next 5 years. It is a truly excellent platform, every fintech company I know at least has their toe in the water. Everyone I show this video to [1] just says "well, shit." [1] ▶ this video

I recommend the talk The Soul of Erlang and Elixir by Sasa Juric. ▶ this video The thing that Erlang amd Elixir have different is the BEAM VM and its support of concurrent processes at the VM level. So there are some things that they can do that Akka can't. For example, the schedule is preemptive and keeps processes alive even though there may be rogue processes pegging the CPU.

Runs on the Erlang Virtual Machine, also known as the BEAM. Erlang was built for scalability and fault tolerance of telephone switches by Ericsson in the 80's. Give this a watch, "The Soul of Erlang and Elixir". Covers a lot of what's nice about the underlying platform. ▶ this video

No, they're equivalent. It makes no difference whether I calculate in the current process, spawned a process, started a process via the Supervisor, Task.async, or what not. They are all equivalent in the sense that they use BEAM processes. An Elixir, Erlang, or any other developer using the BEAM VM (or at the very least myself since I don't want to generalize) doesn't make a semantic distinction between spawn and Task.async/3 because there is none. The significant differentiation is whether or not the caller is expecting a returned value, if not then Task.start_link can be used instead. I don't need to worry about function colouring because there is none. I also don't need to worry about async vs Task.run like in C# because in Elixir there is none. To be asynchronous in Elixir/Erlang/etc... is to be synchronous. To equate it to modern backends, we basically have a microservice but every service can directly call each other. I think I also might have been talking around you a bit, the BEAM VM sets itself apart from C#'s async/await or the TPL due to its implementation of the actor model. This video by Sasa Juric can explain better than I can the general overview of the BEAM: [1]. But a rough tl;dr, a BEAM process is to the BEAM, what an OS process is to the OS. We don't define a main function as the process supervisor in BEAM spawns processes we define instead and those are our "entrypoints." [1] ▶ this video

There are entire languages built upon this model! Anything using the BEAM is a great example. Erlang, Elixir, Gleam, etc. The runtime acts as an event loop and if a specific program is hogging too much time on the CPU, it will get paused and thrown to the back of the execution stack. This is all transparent (relatively) for the developer. Here’s a video if you want to see an example: ▶ this video

I can highly recommend Elixir in Action, 2nd ed. This talk by the same author is also a good introduction in video format: ▶ this video