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Elixir vs Elm: What are the differences?
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.
What is Elm? A type inferred, functional reactive language that compiles to HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Writing HTML apps is super easy with elm-lang/html. Not only does it render extremely fast, it also quietly guides you towards well-architected code.
Elixir and Elm can be primarily classified as "Languages" tools.
"Concurrency" is the top reason why over 124 developers like Elixir, while over 37 developers mention "Code stays clean" as the leading cause for choosing Elm.
Elixir and Elm are both open source tools. It seems that Elixir with 15.6K GitHub stars and 2.22K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Elm with 5.3K GitHub stars and 424 GitHub forks.
Resultados Digitais, NoRedInk, and Poll Everywhere are some of the popular companies that use Elixir, whereas Elm is used by NoRedInk, Brilliant, and RolePoint. Elixir has a broader approval, being mentioned in 177 company stacks & 190 developers stacks; compared to Elm, which is listed in 27 company stacks and 35 developer stacks.
#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
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.
Pros of Elixir
- Concurrency169
- Functional155
- Erlang vm130
- Great documentation110
- Great tooling103
- Immutable data structures84
- Open source79
- Pattern-matching76
- Easy to get started61
- Actor library58
- Functional with a neat syntax29
- Ruby inspired28
- Homoiconic24
- Erlang evolved23
- Beauty of Ruby, Speed of Erlang/C21
- Fault Tolerant17
- High Performance13
- Simple13
- Good lang10
- Stinkin' fast, no memory leaks, easy on the eyes9
- Doc as first class citizen9
- Pipe Operator9
- Resilient to failure7
- Fun to write6
- OTP5
- GenServer takes the guesswork out of background work5
- Fast, Concurrent with clean error messages4
- Idempotence4
- Not Swift4
- Pattern matching4
- Error isolation2
- Easy to use1
- Dynamic Typing1
Pros of Elm
- Code stays clean43
- Great type system41
- No Runtime Exceptions39
- Fun32
- Easy to understand27
- Correctness21
- Type safety21
- JS fatigue15
- Declarative11
- Ecosystem agrees on one Application Architecture11
- Friendly compiler messages9
- Fast rendering7
- Welcoming community7
- If it compiles, it runs6
- Stable ecosystem5
- 'Batteries included'4
- Package.elm-lang.org2
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Cons of Elixir
- Fewer jobs for Elixir experts11
- Smaller userbase than other mainstream languages7
- Elixir's dot notation less readable ("object": 1st arg)5
- Dynamic typing4
- Difficult to understand1
- Not a lot of learning books available1
Cons of Elm
- No typeclasses -> repitition (i.e. map has 130versions)2
- JS interoperability a bit more involved2
- Backwards compability breaks between releases1
- More code is required1
- Main developer enforces "the correct" style hard1
- JS interop can not be async1
- No communication with users1