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Arc

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Elixir

3.4K
3.3K
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1.3K
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Arc vs Elixir: What are the differences?

What is Arc? A dialect of the Lisp programming language developed by Paul Graham and Robert Morris. Arc is designed for exploratory programming: the kind where you decide what to write by writing it. A good medium for exploratory programming is one that makes programs brief and malleable, so that's what we've aimed for. This is a medium for sketching software.

What is Elixir? Dynamic, functional language designed for building scalable and maintainable applications. Elixir leverages the Erlang VM, known for running low-latency, distributed and fault-tolerant systems, while also being successfully used in web development and the embedded software domain.

Arc and Elixir can be primarily classified as "Languages" tools.

Elixir is an open source tool with 15.6K GitHub stars and 2.22K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Elixir's open source repository on GitHub.

According to the StackShare community, Elixir has a broader approval, being mentioned in 177 company stacks & 190 developers stacks; compared to Arc, which is listed in 7 company stacks and 6 developer stacks.

Decisions about Arc and Elixir

#rust #elixir So am creating a messenger with voice call capabilities app which the user signs up using phone number and so at first i wanted to use Actix so i learned Rust so i thought to myself because well its first i felt its a bit immature to use actix web even though some companies are using Rust but we cant really say the full potential of Rust in a full scale app for example in Discord both Elixir and Rust are used meaning there is equal need for them but for Elixir so many companies use it from Whatsapp, Wechat, etc and this means something for Rust is not ready to go full scale we cant assume all this possibilities when it come Rust. So i decided to go the Erlang way after alot of Thinking so Do you think i made the right decision?Am 19 year programmer so i assume am not experienced as you so your answer or comment would really valuable to me

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Timm Stelzer
VP Of Engineering at Flexperto GmbH · | 18 upvotes · 652.9K views

We have a lot of experience in JavaScript, writing our services in NodeJS allows developers to transition to the back end without any friction, without having to learn a new language. There is also the option to write services in TypeScript, which adds an expressive type layer. The semi-shared ecosystem between front and back end is nice as well, though specifically NodeJS libraries sometimes suffer in quality, compared to other major languages.

As for why we didn't pick the other languages, most of it comes down to "personal preference" and historically grown code bases, but let's do some post-hoc deduction:

Go is a practical choice, reasonably easy to learn, but until we find performance issues with our NodeJS stack, there is simply no reason to switch. The benefits of using NodeJS so far outweigh those of picking Go. This might change in the future.

PHP is a language we're still using in big parts of our system, and are still sometimes writing new code in. Modern PHP has fixed some of its issues, and probably has the fastest development cycle time, but it suffers around modelling complex asynchronous tasks, and (on a personal note) lack of support for writing in a functional style.

We don't use Python, Elixir or Ruby, mostly because of personal preference and for historic reasons.

Rust, though I personally love and use it in my projects, would require us to specifically hire for that, as the learning curve is quite steep. Its web ecosystem is OK by now (see https://www.arewewebyet.org/), but in my opinion, it is still no where near that of the other web languages. In other words, we are not willing to pay the price for playing this innovation card.

Haskell, as with Rust, I personally adore, but is simply too esoteric for us. There are problem domains where it shines, ours is not one of them.

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Pros of Arc
Pros of Elixir
    Be the first to leave a pro
    • 174
      Concurrency
    • 162
      Functional
    • 133
      Erlang vm
    • 113
      Great documentation
    • 105
      Great tooling
    • 87
      Immutable data structures
    • 81
      Open source
    • 77
      Pattern-matching
    • 62
      Easy to get started
    • 59
      Actor library
    • 32
      Functional with a neat syntax
    • 29
      Ruby inspired
    • 25
      Erlang evolved
    • 24
      Homoiconic
    • 22
      Beauty of Ruby, Speed of Erlang/C
    • 17
      Fault Tolerant
    • 14
      Simple
    • 13
      High Performance
    • 11
      Doc as first class citizen
    • 11
      Good lang
    • 11
      Pipe Operator
    • 9
      Stinkin' fast, no memory leaks, easy on the eyes
    • 9
      Fun to write
    • 8
      OTP
    • 8
      Resilient to failure
    • 6
      GenServer takes the guesswork out of background work
    • 4
      Pattern matching
    • 4
      Not Swift
    • 4
      Idempotence
    • 4
      Fast, Concurrent with clean error messages
    • 3
      Easy to use
    • 2
      Dynamic Typing
    • 2
      Error isolation

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    Cons of Arc
    Cons of Elixir
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      • 11
        Fewer jobs for Elixir experts
      • 7
        Smaller userbase than other mainstream languages
      • 5
        Elixir's dot notation less readable ("object": 1st arg)
      • 4
        Dynamic typing
      • 2
        Difficult to understand
      • 1
        Not a lot of learning books available

      Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

      - No public GitHub repository available -

      What is Arc?

      Arc is designed for exploratory programming: the kind where you decide what to write by writing it. A good medium for exploratory programming is one that makes programs brief and malleable, so that's what we've aimed for. This is a medium for sketching software.

      What is Elixir?

      Elixir leverages the Erlang VM, known for running low-latency, distributed and fault-tolerant systems, while also being successfully used in web development and the embedded software domain.

      Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

      What companies use Arc?
      What companies use Elixir?
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      What tools integrate with Arc?
      What tools integrate with Elixir?

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      Blog Posts

      Oct 24 2019 at 7:43PM

      AppSignal

      JavaScriptNode.jsJava+8
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      What are some alternatives to Arc and Elixir?
      Akutan
      A distributed knowledge graph store. Knowledge graphs are suitable for modeling data that is highly interconnected by many types of relationships, like encyclopedic information about the world.
      JavaScript
      JavaScript is most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic,and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.
      Python
      Python is a general purpose programming language created by Guido Van Rossum. Python is most praised for its elegant syntax and readable code, if you are just beginning your programming career python suits you best.
      Node.js
      Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices.
      HTML5
      HTML5 is a core technology markup language of the Internet used for structuring and presenting content for the World Wide Web. As of October 2014 this is the final and complete fifth revision of the HTML standard of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The previous version, HTML 4, was standardised in 1997.
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