Introduction to Elixir Key Reasons to Choose This Dynamic Language
Introduction to Elixir: Key Reasons to Choose This Dynamic Language #
Excerpt #
Understand what Elixir is, its core features, and why it’s becoming a go-to language for developers looking for robust, maintainable, and concurrent solutions.
The first question is simple – Elixir is a high-level, general-purpose, concurrent functional programming language that runs on the Erlang VM (BEAM). You may have heard this piece of trivia before, so let’s dissect the topic further: what Elixir is used for, Elixir’s core strengths, capabilities, and scenarios where it can be a valuable asset. We’ll also explore its limitations to help you decide whether Elixir fits your project.
How and why was Elixir made? #
The short answer would be that Elixir was created to bridge the gap between developer satisfaction (and productivity) and Erlang’s power. How does Elixir implement such an ambitious aspiration?
José Valim, Elixir’s creator, explains why Erlang turned his attention:
The most important thing for Elixir as a programming language is Erlang VM, which was created to build telephone switches. What you want from a telephone switch is to handle not just two connections, it should be highly concurrent. […] Then people realized that our scenario is similar to the web. We have browsers connected to the server
Notable that Ruby was José’s primary programming language, but its MRI VM had fundamental limitations. José borrowed some syntax and developer experience philosophies from Ruby, such as metaprogramming capabilities, convention over configuration, and focus on developer happiness and productivity. This familiarity aims to ease the transition for Ruby developers and provide a productive development experience.
So these features became cornerstones (or ingredients, if you will) of the new programming language challenge to shift how we think about our applications:
The Erlang VM advantage
The Erlang VM, also known as BEAM (Bogdan/Björn’s Erlang Abstract Machine), is a virtual machine designed for building highly concurrent, low-latency, and fault-tolerant systems. It leverages the Actor Model for concurrency and lightweight processes, enabling efficient parallel execution and scalability.
Functional Programming Paradigm
Unlike Ruby’s object-oriented approach, Elixir embraces functional programming principles, leveraging immutable data structures and function composition. This fundamental difference in programming paradigms sets Elixir apart from Ruby and contributes to its concurrency and fault tolerance strengths.
Concurrency Model
Elixir inherited Erlang’s Actor Model and lightweight process concurrency, which radically differs from Ruby’s thread-based concurrency model. This approach enables more efficient handling of concurrent operations and better scalability.
Fault-tolerance and Self-healing
One of Elixir’s key strengths is its fault tolerance and self-healing capabilities inherited from the Erlang VM. Elixir applications can recover from crashes and continue running, a feature not built into Ruby, ensuring higher system reliability and uptime.
What perks and features has Elixir obtained? #
Elixir’s unique traits emerge from the harmonious fusion of its core principles and foundations. Just as a skilled architect combines various materials and techniques to create a structurally sound and aesthetically pleasing building, Elixir seamlessly integrates the power of the Erlang VM, the principles of functional programming, a robust concurrency model, fault tolerance, and a focus on developer satisfaction to craft a language that excels in multiple domains. From this solid foundation, Elixir has obtained a range of powerful features and perks, including:
Concise and expressive Syntax #
Productivity and expressiveness
While retaining the power and capabilities of Erlang, Elixir aimed to provide a more modern, productive, and expressive syntax inspired by languages like Ruby. The goal was to make writing concurrent, parallel, and distributed applications easier without sacrificing performance or reliability. Functional programming, a core principle of Elixir, shifts the developer’s focus from OOP patterns and the burden of maintaining best practices to a deeper understanding of data and architecture. This approach promises more efficient code and a more satisfying development experience, resulting in higher productivity.
Metaprogramming
Metaprogramming is a powerful concept that allows writing code that generates or manipulates other code at runtime. In Elixir, metaprogramming is facilitated through macros, which are a way to extend the language itself. Macros can generate boilerplate code or create abstractions that reduce code duplication. For instance, the Ecto library uses macros to provide a concise and expressive API for defining database schemas and queries.
Since macros are executed at compile-time, they can be used to perform optimizations or transformations on your code, potentially improving performance or reducing code size. Several popular Elixir libraries, such as Ecto (database library) and Phoenix (web framework), extensively use metaprogramming to provide a more concise and expressive API.
Reduced resource consumption for maintenance and extension
Elixir’s conciseness and dynamicness lead to increased productivity, faster iteration cycles, and quicker time to market for new features or applications. By reducing code duplication and providing abstractions through metaprogramming, Elixir helps developers focus on writing more business logic with fewer lines of code.
This approach reduces developers’ mental load and eliminates the need to bloat the development team unnecessarily. As a general rule, 100,000 lines of code is often considered the limit that one developer can effectively maintain and understand. By leveraging Elixir’s features, developers can ensure that those 100,000 lines cover the most possible business logic, leading to more efficient and maintainable codebases.
Powerful virtual machine #
Concurrency and scalability
Elixir was designed to handle massive concurrency and scalability requirements from the ground up. Its’ virtual machine was initially developed by Ericsson for building highly concurrent, distributed, fault-tolerant systems, especially in telecommunications. Elixir’s distributed nature and ability to run processes across multiple nodes make it easier to scale applications horizontally by adding more servers as needed.
Fault tolerance
In Elixir processes are lightweight and isolated execution units. This allows for creating thousands or even millions of processes without significant overhead, creating an opportunity to “Let it Crash” instead of trying to handle every possible error condition within a process. The “Let it crash” philosophy implies that processes are designed to crash when they encounter an unrecoverable error, and the supervisor handles the failure by restarting or taking appropriate actions.
Optimized infrastructure usage
Elixir processes are lightweight and can handle many concurrent connections without consuming excessive resources. This efficient resource utilization means you can run more processes on the same hardware, potentially reducing the number of servers or instances required. This can help you avoid over-provisioning resources and optimize hosting costs based on your actual traffic and load. Minimizing downtime and ensuring your applications remain operational can optimize your hosting costs and avoid unnecessary expenses due to failures or outages.
Community and ecosystem #
High-skill hiring
One of the advantages of Elixir’s niche status is that it attracts highly skilled and dedicated developers. Unlike more mainstream languages, developers don’t typically stumble upon Elixir by chance; instead, they get an introduction to Elixir by seeking it out and investing time learning its unique traits and principles. This self-selection process often results in a high-skill hiring advantage that can translate into a more productive and efficient development team capable of delivering complex, mission-critical applications. Additionally, the dedication and passion that Elixir developers bring to their work can foster a culture of continuous learning and innovation within the organization.
Leveraging the existing Erlang ecosystem
By running on the Erlang VM (BEAM) and being compatible with Erlang, Elixir inherits the vast ecosystem of battle-tested libraries, tools, and frameworks developed over decades for building robust, fault-tolerant systems. This ecosystem includes distributed computing, messaging, and more components, providing a solid foundation for building scalable and reliable applications. Elixir developers can leverage existing Erlang ecosystem benefits from Elixir’s more modern and expressive syntax, increasing productivity and developer satisfaction.
Test-driven development
Elixir’s functional nature and immutable data structures make it well-suited for test-driven development (TDD) practices. TDD is a software development methodology that emphasizes writing tests before implementing code. This approach helps ensure that code is designed to be testable from the outset and encourages a modular, decoupled architecture. Elixir’s tooling, such as the built-in test framework (ExUnit) and code coverage tools, make writing and running tests easy, encouraging developers to adopt TDD practices. TDD also promotes a more iterative and incremental development process, allowing teams to refactor and evolve their codebase confidently as the test suite continuously validates changes.
Elixir Programming Language’s Side-effects #
Possibility to create hard-to-read and non-obvious code
Pattern-matching in Elixir helps to skip naming, requiring a developer with high skills to onboard the project. Elixir’s metaprogramming capabilities, while powerful, can sometimes lead to “magic” code that’s harder to understand if not used judiciously. Teams adopting Elixir should establish coding conventions and guidelines to maintain code readability and consistency, mitigating the potential for hard-to-read code.
High entry threshold
Elixir’s functional programming paradigm, immutable data structures, and process-based concurrency model can be unfamiliar concepts for developers from object-oriented or imperative programming backgrounds.
Rare expertise
Elixir’s niche status can make it challenging to find experienced Elixir developers, which could lead to higher hiring costs or longer onboarding times. This challenge can be mitigated by investing in training and upskilling existing team members or leveraging the growing Elixir community and online resources for learning and support.
Performance for specific workloads
While Elixir excels at handling concurrent workloads and distributed systems, there may be specific computational workloads or algorithms where other languages or tools outperform Elixir regarding raw performance or memory efficiency. For example, Elixir’s immutable structures can be a bottleneck for complex mathematical computations, but the Nx project aims to solve this problem.
What can you build with Elixir? #
Our previous article explored some of the most known Elixir use cases. Of course, Elixir usage is not limited to the described scenarios; as a general-purpose language, it can be handy for many tasks. But which of them is Elixir’s thing?
Solid Backend Systems
Elixir’s foundation in the battle-tested Erlang/OTP platform makes it an excellent choice for developing highly concurrent, fault-tolerant, and scalable backend systems capable of handling massive traffic and data thanks to the Phoenix Framework.
Realtime Frontend Applications
While Elixir shines brightest in the backend realm, its compatibility with technologies like Phoenix LiveView enables you to create rich and interactive user interfaces for the front-end side of your applications. Leveraging the advantage of persistent websocket connection,, you can build rich real-time frontend apps.
Background Job Processing
Elixir’s lightweight processes and robust supervision trees make it ideal for building efficient and reliable background job processing systems, ensuring that critical tasks are executed without interruption. Open-source projects like Oban simplify queue and retry management as much as possible.
Machine Learning and Data Processing
Elixir’s functional nature and powerful data manipulation capabilities make it well-suited for building machine learning models and processing large datasets, enabling you to extract valuable insights from your data thanks to projects like LiveBook, Axon, and Bumblebee.
Media Processing
While not its primary focus, Elixir can be leveraged for media processing tasks, such as video transcoding, image manipulation, and real-time media streaming, thanks to its ability to interface with existing libraries and tools. If you are interested in media processing with Elixir, you can give a try to the Membrane Framework.
Takeaway #
By seamlessly combining the battle-tested Erlang VM, functional programming principles, a robust concurrency model, and a focus on developer productivity, Elixir offers a unique blend of performance, reliability, and expressiveness. Whether you’re building high-traffic backend systems, real-time applications, distributed systems, or venturing into domains like machine learning and data processing, Elixir’s capabilities make it a compelling choice. While it may have a steeper learning curve and a relatively smaller ecosystem than more established languages, the potential benefits of adopting Elixir can outweigh these challenges, especially for projects prioritizing concurrency, scalability, and fault tolerance. Wondering how Elixir can benefit your business? Feel free to reach out to us, and we’ll tailor Elixir power to your unique needs.