I have started fiddling with rust, and one thing that I miss from the Elixir world is binary pattern parsing/matching. The elixir model is so much nicer, I've used byteorder to convert a datetime to a byte array and then the reverse and it is not the most elegant code, nom looks much nicer. I wish rust had Elixir/Erlang like binary pattern matching.
I've been using Elixir/Erlang for more than 6 years and absolutely love it. The community is a lovely place to be, tooling is great. Concurrency is awesome. Erlang is battle tested. If you are building applications that have anything to do with networks, you'll be able to build some seriously performant apps without having to reach for other tools and I love the community's focus on performance.
> We also found many times missing libraries, or found libraries which are incomplete, or unmaintained or just not well documented
Can you give some examples here. This may have been true in the past, but isn't true anymore. I can give an example where ruby is lacking: Performant HTTP libraries, Elixir and Erlang are so good in this space, look at `finch`, `httpoison` etc,. there is first class support for HTTP2 and connection pooling / persistent connections which is very hard to find in ruby.
> Tooling is just terrible. The VSCode plugin is crap, kills the CPU unless you disable features. There is no IDE from jetbrains. There is a plugin but last time I tried it, it was even worse than the VSCode plugin.
Which plugin are you referring to? Is it using dialyzer? Using dialyzer gives you so much static analysis for free as opposed to the default ruby vscode plugin. I have never heard of complaints about tooling. On the other hand, I know lots of developers who love the tooling, mix is great, iex gives you documentation with just `h String`. Plus with language server support, you have really good IDE support in vscode and vim. Look at the number of stars on the `ElixirLS` plugin here: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/search?term=elixir&targ...
> Also, I've read some comments where people mention "we don't need redis", "we don't need workers" everything is so much easier. That was our thinking at first. But then you realize on deployments you will lose your cache, or your background jobs, etc.
Yes, you'll lose data in your cache. Caches are supposed to be ephemeral, not everyone needs their caches to be persisted. However, if your use case requires persistence, you have a lot more options than just sticking it in redis. Plus, `oban` is a high quality background processor with persistence, without the need for adding redis to your stack.
For applications where performance matters, Elixir and Erlang give you lots of tools to build a truly performant app, However, if you don't need those tools, you might be better off building it in something more familiar.
> Using dialyzer gives you so much static analysis for free as opposed to the default ruby vscode plugin. I have never heard of complaints about tooling.
ctrl-f for "dialyzer" in this thread, and you will :)
Or peek into my four-year old codebase, and try to give a usefull meaning to the error 'function has no local return' that pops up in dozens of functions which, honest to FSM, have a local return. (The message usually, but not systematically, mean that the function is calling a function that is calling a function that is ..[skip].. calling a function which spec is not exactly respecting the `@spec` comment - because how could it, there is no static type checker ;) ?)
I love Elixir, but even I have to say that the tooling story in IDEs is awful. Using VSCode, ElixirLS is the best extension I've found so far, but even the experience with it makes me want to ditch Elixir entirely more often than not (and no, the number of stars on VSCode marketplace means nothing).
The extension will often just lock up, either giving you no autosuggestions/errors, or refusing to remove errors that you've already resolved, and the only way to fix it reliably is to delete the .elixir_ls/ folder and/or completely close and restart VSCode, both of which require rebuilding the entire dialyzer which is a constant battery killer on laptops. This is such a frequent issue that some days I find myself having to quit/reopen VSCode at least once an hour, and despite spending absurd amounts of time trying to find a long term fix, I've never found one.
Not to mention the issue that has been open for 8+ months where ElixirLS is built using an older version of Elixir, and if you are using a recent version of Elixir for your project (anything newer than 1.9), some of the core functionality of ElixirLS just breaks (autocomplete and hover tips). That issue alone makes me want to ditch ElixirLS (and likely Elixir) entirely.
With similar web apps (e.g. hashing of passwords) I was thinking it would be great to be able to show to the user that this web page can't send data anywhere once it is loaded
(I understand that this might be tricky or even impossible (?) to ensure in browsers but it would be interesting to be able to give and prove guarantees like that to the user)
I used to program professionally in Elixir where we talked to a ton of external providers. So, our app was heavy on the network (http) and Elixir was a really good fit for it. Now, I use it on personal projects.
The Elixir ecosystem is really healthy. You can find almost any package you want on hex (https://hex.pm/). Moreover, because it is built on top of erlang you can seamlessly use any Erlang code (which a lot of Elixir apps use).
You can usually find high-quality libraries with a google search or looking at the number of stars of a hex package. Mix, the build tool is awesome and the language now has out of the box support for creating deployment releases.
Love the game! It would be nice to wrap this up in an Android app and put it on the market place just because when I build games like these my kids end up closing the browser somehow :) I built a few of these at: http://putty.minhajuddin.com/
