José Valim & team have made such an incredible language and ecosystem. thank you for all the faithful work, especially the run up to 1.20 over this past year
Yeah. You'll notice that there's a mix of light and dark. Some segments are light-on-dark, then it switches to dark-on-light. It appears to me like a "design trend" that's at odds with accessibility. https://www.apple.com does this too.
I don't really have large monitors by today's standards, and the site looks nice enough but fully half of what I'm looking at is blank space. I don't remember what the old site looked like so don't know if that's really a change.
Reading the Erlang ProgProgrammers book by Joe Armstrong made me a better Ruby programmer as it changed my perspective on functional programming and abstractions.
I first reached for Elixir when Ruby couldn't handle large amounts of websocket messages. It really shines in high-concurrency contexts. I also love Phoenix LiveView and have a couple of side-projects running on it.
I think most will agree that it improved on Erlang.
For me as a long-term ruby user, though, elixir is
not quite as elegant as it could or should have been.
Even simple things such as "defmodule Xyz do" feels
weird to me.
There are multiple people working on the JIT within the last 5-6 years. The WhatsApp folks also contribute meaningfully.
I suspect once the Erlang/OTP team squeezes all performance in the JIT, they will look into optimizing across modules, which will probably open up many new possibilities, but it requires rethinking some runtime primitives.
A few years ago, I was working on an interpreter implemented in elixir for a domain specific language. It was a pretty basic metacircular interpreter. It relied heavily on function signature dispatch. When I tried breaking up the massive “interpret” function across modules, performance tanked. I got it all back by using some macro shenanigans, but understandably the team did not like this.
Knowing what I know now, I would’ve tried to push for a threaded interpreter to get rid of the runtime overhead of dispatching altogether. I don’t know if they’ve changed the architecture of that module much since I left :-)
i ran a quick experiment where instead of doing boxing the way its done in the beam currently, i used a different boxing (NaN strategy and there was a 10x speedup
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.
It's been a while, but I used to work at WhatsApp and we used Erlang distribution heavily. I understand the clusters have gotten really huge since I left.
It's super handy. There's no security barrier between nodes. It's a headache if your network is unreliable.
For a chat app, messaging someone becomes a series of steps:
a) look up if they're online (send a message to the presence database service)
b) if you got a process id back, that's the process connected to the user, so send it the message. The process could be on the same machine or not, but the sending api is the same. This is the special part: few other environments make arbitrary messaging between processes/threads/tasks/whathaveyou so pervasive.
c) if you don't get a process id back, the user is offline; send the message to the offline database.
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.
On the first syntax example: there’s something funny to me about using three pipe operator and four different functions to turn “hello world” into “Hello World”.
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.
> appreciate Elixir but the problem is the job market/talent pool is tiny compared to other existing languages.
> I shipped an entire telecom infrastructure with barely knowing Elixir and we brought on contractors to audit the code and they found no issues.
Erlang/Elixir experience is rare, because it's not widely used and the teams are small. It's not worth trying to hire for it. Hire for people who can figure it out on the go (amd are willing to give it a try).
You did it, hire other people who seem likely to be able to.
as a SWE this is not a good sign. it means the job market is slowly transitioning into temp work like economics. The value I got out of the Elixir contractors was immense since it not only proved that we can get a huge bulk of the work done without specialists and use them on demand for audit for a few months before AI this would've been not been possible.
normal market dynamics suggest scarcity demand premiums but this is not the case with software developers it seems.
both contracts have over 10 years of experience with Elixir and one of them have written a widely used library. I think you are tad out of touch with the job market and with where agentic coding is right now.
i hired a biologist (for my pharma startup) and she produced feature ideas for our internal stack and was guiding claude to write idiomatic code with feedback from my reviews with no coding experience. realistically if you want to start an elixir company today you need one consciencious senior that likes code review and any number of juniors with minimal competency and sufficient curiosity.
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.
Looks nice. But it would be more important
to clean up elixir itself. So many things
are unnecessary syntax-wise. At the least
elixir made working with erlang easier, so
they solved that part.
José Valim & team have made such an incredible language and ecosystem. thank you for all the faithful work, especially the run up to 1.20 over this past year
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.
Ideally websites just respect the existing media queries so you don't even have to switch!
Yeah. You'll notice that there's a mix of light and dark. Some segments are light-on-dark, then it switches to dark-on-light. It appears to me like a "design trend" that's at odds with accessibility. https://www.apple.com does this too.
i along with 99% of people don’t mind it
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Love the new site!
Minor typo in the Erlang card:
“Elixir also excels at IoT, distributed systems, and everything the Erlang is renowned for”
should probably be “everything the Erlang VM is known for” or “everything Erlang is known for.”
Boom! Fixed, thanks!
I don't really have large monitors by today's standards, and the site looks nice enough but fully half of what I'm looking at is blank space. I don't remember what the old site looked like so don't know if that's really a change.
Elixir is such an elegant language.
I'm hoping to find a reason to use it soon.
Reading the Erlang ProgProgrammers book by Joe Armstrong made me a better Ruby programmer as it changed my perspective on functional programming and abstractions.
I first reached for Elixir when Ruby couldn't handle large amounts of websocket messages. It really shines in high-concurrency contexts. I also love Phoenix LiveView and have a couple of side-projects running on it.
I'm hoping to find a reason to use it soon.
Do you have a program that doesn't need to run fast?
its been fun building a multiagent personal assistant.
(wip, no guarantees, this is the engine i use)
https://github.com/ityonemo/ce_ce
Such a delight to use and the core team seems to always make the right decision.
I think most will agree that it improved on Erlang.
For me as a long-term ruby user, though, elixir is not quite as elegant as it could or should have been. Even simple things such as "defmodule Xyz do" feels weird to me.
No mention of AI and LLM in the front page. Life is good.
Thankfully you were here to make sure we didn’t forget about it for even one post
They have a Machine Learning section on the front page. Just have to scroll down a bit, under the "Use Elixir for" section.
I don't think Machine Learning falls under what most people consider "AI" and "LLM" these days, even if they're technically intertwined.
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But I bet the landing page was made with AI assistance.
It was not: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48959936
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It certainly looks like a Claude design to some extent; not all they way however.
It feels less sloppy than most obviously AI generated landing pages.
The only sloppy aspects that stand out to me are the needless animations/transitions.
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
Elixir is great.
OT: 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. The WhatsApp folks also contribute meaningfully.
I suspect once the Erlang/OTP team squeezes all performance in the JIT, they will look into optimizing across modules, which will probably open up many new possibilities, but it requires rethinking some runtime primitives.
A few years ago, I was working on an interpreter implemented in elixir for a domain specific language. It was a pretty basic metacircular interpreter. It relied heavily on function signature dispatch. When I tried breaking up the massive “interpret” function across modules, performance tanked. I got it all back by using some macro shenanigans, but understandably the team did not like this.
Knowing what I know now, I would’ve tried to push for a threaded interpreter to get rid of the runtime overhead of dispatching altogether. I don’t know if they’ve changed the architecture of that module much since I left :-)
Hi Jose
You’re an inspiration for many. Thank you.
I’m curious to know what your top 3 hopes for BEAM itself are for the coming years (in any area that you think would make it better).
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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.
i ran a quick experiment where instead of doing boxing the way its done in the beam currently, i used a different boxing (NaN strategy and there was a 10x speedup
Java and Javascript run times do really well at that.
Looks pretty good, I like that they are highlighting the potential uses for elixir.
I followed the links to docs and getting started, but it says page not found.
The URL: https://elixir.hexdocs.pm/getting-started.html
It should be fixed soon (deploying now). Thank you!!!
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.
It's been a while, but I used to work at WhatsApp and we used Erlang distribution heavily. I understand the clusters have gotten really huge since I left.
It's super handy. There's no security barrier between nodes. It's a headache if your network is unreliable.
For a chat app, messaging someone becomes a series of steps:
a) look up if they're online (send a message to the presence database service)
b) if you got a process id back, that's the process connected to the user, so send it the message. The process could be on the same machine or not, but the sending api is the same. This is the special part: few other environments make arbitrary messaging between processes/threads/tasks/whathaveyou so pervasive.
c) if you don't get a process id back, the user is offline; send the message to the offline database.
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.
I think this version is an improvement over the old one! In particular how it highlights the packages in the ecosystem better.
Nice! The showcase of companies is really nice
On the first syntax example: there’s something funny to me about using three pipe operator and four different functions to turn “hello world” into “Hello World”.
That's a good point. It is meant to be an introductory example but I will see if I can come up with something else! Thanks!
EDIT: shipped!
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?)
It also does not load if Javascript is blocked.
Also observed here: https://elixirforum.com/t/elixir-lang-org-redesign/76041
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.
> appreciate Elixir but the problem is the job market/talent pool is tiny compared to other existing languages.
> I shipped an entire telecom infrastructure with barely knowing Elixir and we brought on contractors to audit the code and they found no issues.
Erlang/Elixir experience is rare, because it's not widely used and the teams are small. It's not worth trying to hire for it. Hire for people who can figure it out on the go (amd are willing to give it a try).
You did it, hire other people who seem likely to be able to.
as a SWE this is not a good sign. it means the job market is slowly transitioning into temp work like economics. The value I got out of the Elixir contractors was immense since it not only proved that we can get a huge bulk of the work done without specialists and use them on demand for audit for a few months before AI this would've been not been possible.
normal market dynamics suggest scarcity demand premiums but this is not the case with software developers it seems.
1 reply →
If you vibe coded an entire telecom infrastructure and an external audit found no issues then it sounds like you might need to find better auditors.
both contracts have over 10 years of experience with Elixir and one of them have written a widely used library. I think you are tad out of touch with the job market and with where agentic coding is right now.
3 replies →
i hired a biologist (for my pharma startup) and she produced feature ideas for our internal stack and was guiding claude to write idiomatic code with feedback from my reviews with no coding experience. realistically if you want to start an elixir company today you need one consciencious senior that likes code review and any number of juniors with minimal competency and sufficient curiosity.
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).
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?
Maybe try and build something and see for yourself? Saying elixir is not fit for real world use shows how little experience with it you have.
Have you tried it since the new type system rolled out?
> not suited for real world use.
I hope you don't use discord or rely on pagerduty.
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
Ignore the haters, it looks very good.
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.
6 replies →
This is how every second website has looked for the past 10 years.
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.
Looks nice. But it would be more important to clean up elixir itself. So many things are unnecessary syntax-wise. At the least elixir made working with erlang easier, so they solved that part.
Such as?
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?
They had a recent re-design last week.