I appreciate Elixir but the problem is the job market/talent pool is tiny compared to other existing languages.
If you buy into the Elixir stack then you now have constraint you could've avoided entirely by avoiding it.
Also for devs there seems to be no premium offered for this talent pool scarcity. With LLMs I think language-specialists are redundant in a large scheme of things. ex) at one of my current remote jobs, I shipped an entire telecom infrastructure with barely knowing Elixir and we brought on contractors to audit the code and they found no issues.
There are multiple people working on the JIT within the last 5-6 years.
I suspect once they squeeze all performance there they will look into optimizing across modules, which will probably open up a lot of optimization possibilities, but it requires rethinking some runtime primitives.
To me, it seems one of the killer use cases for Elixir (/Erlang) is its distributed cluster capability. Does anyone have experience with that or case reports to share? I've used Elixir quite a bit professionally, but mostly as just a "nicer Rails" with horizontally scalable but otherwise independent Phoenix apps in your traditional Kubernetes setup, which seems to me to kind of missing out on its main purpose.
Also interested in hearing about this! I built an elixir k8s control plane recently and kept expecting to reach for it but it never really made sense when it was controlling golang daemonsets.
My usecase is less independent though, that control plane is orchestrating like Lambda/fly.io style workloads on top of firecracker:
https://jomcgi.dev/ember
I've worked a little bit with distributed Elixir using `Horde.DynamicSupervisor` on Kubernetes. Apparently there's other options like 'swarm' and DynamicSupervisor [1]. It'd be great for clear analysis of the benefits these kinds of abstractions bring vs non-BEAM approaches.
Elixir/Erlang works very well in a semi-embedded environment where you need a higher level command and control component that behaves in a deterministic way and is pretty robust.
Ugh, it looks like all the other LLM generated language webpages. It's formulaic at this point. I'd hoped a language like Elixir would be able to hire some people to do it.
The Software Mansion folks designed it and we actually iterated on the designs on Figma, having discussions as humans, and exploring alternatives. They were lovely to work with.
I also worked on all of the copy myself, collecting feedback from core maintainers as I went. The new tagline was a suggestion from Theo which we iterated on. I did use LLMs as an assistant, but I did not ask it to generate the content.
Might as well use LLMs for the whole thing next time, since we will be accused of doing so anyway! :D
Shame then that despite all that, they landed on the same design used by every "I asked an LLM to make me a language and a website this weekend here's what it spit out" project. I mean, I'm not saying it looks bad or is a bad result. Just it's very similar to other things that have put in much less effort.
Its pretty snappy/responsive for me at least so thats good. Normally LLM slop sites are pretty at first but sluggish as hell. So some level of skill went into this one.
There’s no obvious way to switch to normal (aka “light”) mode. Dark mode is very difficult for some people (me included) to read.
If you must default to dark mode that’s your choice but I’d love to see a light mode toggle somewhere prominent.
Elixir is such an elegant language.
I'm hoping to find a reason to use it soon.
No mention of AI and LLM in the front page. Life is good.
This is great! Now waiting for the forum UI update too! :)
Hoping Elixir continues to thrive. It is such a great language (and such a great language for AI coding too!)
In fact it came out as the absolute best in a comparison by Tencent (1). See table 4. It’s more than a year old though.
1. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.09101
Looks great! There are some style quirks with cutoff elements in Firefox 152.0.6: https://imgur.com/a/OtnESi7
Site doesn't work for me (older Firefox). Looks like there's no CSS and some Javascript error (probably makes it bail out loading the CSS?)
I appreciate Elixir but the problem is the job market/talent pool is tiny compared to other existing languages.
If you buy into the Elixir stack then you now have constraint you could've avoided entirely by avoiding it.
Also for devs there seems to be no premium offered for this talent pool scarcity. With LLMs I think language-specialists are redundant in a large scheme of things. ex) at one of my current remote jobs, I shipped an entire telecom infrastructure with barely knowing Elixir and we brought on contractors to audit the code and they found no issues.
I wish more funding & development effort went into BEAM itself on making it more performant.
Note: I’m not talking concurrency. I’m talking pure raw performance.
Seems like it’s been a one person show for over a decade on making it faster.
There are multiple people working on the JIT within the last 5-6 years.
I suspect once they squeeze all performance there they will look into optimizing across modules, which will probably open up a lot of optimization possibilities, but it requires rethinking some runtime primitives.
It’s pretty hard to make things like math faster for real world use cases in a bytecode interpreter.
It's a JIT nowadays. Admittedly an extremely simple one, to minimize compile times and maintenance overhead.
You can get substantial performance improvements by using guards though. See what Wings3D does with is_float() everywhere in hot numeric-heavy code.
Java and Javascript run times do really well at that.
To me, it seems one of the killer use cases for Elixir (/Erlang) is its distributed cluster capability. Does anyone have experience with that or case reports to share? I've used Elixir quite a bit professionally, but mostly as just a "nicer Rails" with horizontally scalable but otherwise independent Phoenix apps in your traditional Kubernetes setup, which seems to me to kind of missing out on its main purpose.
Also interested in hearing about this! I built an elixir k8s control plane recently and kept expecting to reach for it but it never really made sense when it was controlling golang daemonsets.
My usecase is less independent though, that control plane is orchestrating like Lambda/fly.io style workloads on top of firecracker: https://jomcgi.dev/ember
I've worked a little bit with distributed Elixir using `Horde.DynamicSupervisor` on Kubernetes. Apparently there's other options like 'swarm' and DynamicSupervisor [1]. It'd be great for clear analysis of the benefits these kinds of abstractions bring vs non-BEAM approaches.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZmDEUeHeVI
Elixir/Erlang works very well in a semi-embedded environment where you need a higher level command and control component that behaves in a deterministic way and is pretty robust.
I was involved, years ago, in using Erlang on these devices: https://www.icare-world.com/us/product/icare-eidon/
It was a lot of fun and there were some very interesting challenges for everyone involved.
Looks pretty good, I like that they are highlighting the potential uses for elixir.
Nice! The showcase of companies is really nice
I prefer https://jank-lang.org/ new re-design, and the approach of a more step-wise refinement.
How is this language related to Elixir? Or are you just commenting that another language has a website?
Why does it have like 0.1s animations?
Can you clarify which ones? We will be glad to improve them (or feel free to send a PR).
Ugh, it looks like all the other LLM generated language webpages. It's formulaic at this point. I'd hoped a language like Elixir would be able to hire some people to do it.
The Software Mansion folks designed it and we actually iterated on the designs on Figma, having discussions as humans, and exploring alternatives. They were lovely to work with.
I also worked on all of the copy myself, collecting feedback from core maintainers as I went. The new tagline was a suggestion from Theo which we iterated on. I did use LLMs as an assistant, but I did not ask it to generate the content.
Might as well use LLMs for the whole thing next time, since we will be accused of doing so anyway! :D
Shame then that despite all that, they landed on the same design used by every "I asked an LLM to make me a language and a website this weekend here's what it spit out" project. I mean, I'm not saying it looks bad or is a bad result. Just it's very similar to other things that have put in much less effort.
"Human produces output similar to a machine trained on all human output"
Its pretty snappy/responsive for me at least so thats good. Normally LLM slop sites are pretty at first but sluggish as hell. So some level of skill went into this one.
Also observed here: https://elixirforum.com/t/elixir-lang-org-redesign/76041
I guess elixir is a nice lang for the niche of erlang. But its dynamic (the "type system" is really meh at best) its not suited for real world use.
If i go full dynamic, why not use pure erlang instead?
Have you tried it since the new type system rolled out?