Seven reasons to use Elixir in 2019

Elixir seems to be like a fresh new programming language which was created just a few years ago, in 2012, but it’s not the full picture: Elixir is really a friendly interface and tooling for Erlang virtual machine (BEAM). And just to remind you, Erlang has been widely used since the 80s to build reliable, fault-tolerant, concurrent and distributed systems like backends, telephony, communications - and so does Elixir.

If you want your service or server to be eternally available with almost zero downtime then it could be a top match for you. Elixir has all the powers of Erlang and provides even more libraries, tools and opportunities.

Erlang inherited its syntax and semantics mostly from Prolog - a logic programming language associated with artificial intelligence and computational linguistics. Right now it seems very aged and clunky and not the best suitable for modern functional programming language. Elixir, in contradistinction to Erlang, was heavily influenced by Ruby and Clojure, and its syntax and semantics looks really fresh, eloquent and easy to write and read. Elixir has really collected all the best parts of these languages and Erlang to make developers much more productive and efficient.

  defmodule Example do
    def list_users(ids) do
        User
         |> where([u], u.id in ^ids)
         |> order_by(asc: :inserted_at)
         |> Repo.all()
    end
  end

Elixir’s syntax is beautiful yet simple enough. Of course it seems like syntax sugar for Erlang but it’s really enough to let you compose programs in most elegant and simple way. There are no sophisticated and intricate features that can mislead you. There is less room for mistakes but much more possibilities to write a reliable, robust code in the most expressive yet simple way. As a developer you can always be sure that your Elixir’s program will be predictable, explicit, easy to understand and extend.

Elixir VM’s model of concurrency allows you to run your programs efficiently on multi-core CPUs to use all the powers of your computer, but it is not limited to only one machine - you can scale your application on multiple machines and there are no any limitations. For example, you can have 2 million open web socket connections or 5 000 000 concurrent users .

Elixir’s processes are extremely lightweight and it makes Elixir also resource efficient - you don’t need so many machines, CPUs or have hundreds of GB of RAM to handle your load. But if you really need to then your program will always be ready to scale both horizontally and vertically.

Elixir is very fast and performant. Its most popular web framework is Phoenix is almost 10 times faster than Ruby on Rails and Node.js . Phoenix is much more consistent under the high load though. And as I’ve said before, Elixir is quite resource effective so the same web server implemented in Elixir and Phoenix will handle much more load than Ruby on Rails application and will consume much less RAM.

However, Elixir can be not so good when it comes to heavy computations, but you can avoid the bottlenecks by using the native implemented functions - NIFs - that allow you to rewrite problematic code to make it way more performant.

Elixir is a functional programming language and it encourages you to write pure, side-effect free functions, keep your logic and data separated and your variables immutable. Elixir has first-class functions, functions composition, closures, high-order functions, pattern-matching - all that you really need to write your programs according to the functional programming paradigm.

All these features made Elixir’s concurrency model so simple and easy to use. You shouldn’t be afraid to communicate between different processes, nodes, machines but be insured from the most concurrency issues.

Elixir has a plethora of great tools and instruments that helps developers to write, test, build, deploy and debug their applications.

• Package manager
• Interactive shell
• Code formatter
• Packing into releases
• Deployment tool
• Linters and quality checks
• Discrepancy analyzer
• Concurrency errors checker
• Gradual types system
• Frontend-independent language-server
• And even more!

Elixir was invented by Jose Valim who was a former Ruby on Rails community participant. Starting from the very beginning many people have switched from Ruby and Python to Elixir. Elixir’s community is quite friendly, responsive and welcoming, it’s easy to find help or advice there. Elixir could be your first programming language or tenth - it doesn’t matter, you will get support in any case.

Right now there are so many tools and libraries in Elixir and so in Erlang.

If you want so start your new 2019 year from a little adventure then you can learn Elixir or adopt it in your business. It suits very well for any server-side applications, web applications, embedded systems, scripts. You can start by reading the learning resources or try Elixir School.

We are 100% happy with Elixir as the core technology in our modern social platform Salam.io and really want to encourage anyone to give Elixir a try in their projects.

Happy hacking everyone!