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  5. Elixir vs Rails API

Elixir vs Rails API

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Elixir
Elixir
Stacks3.5K
Followers3.3K
Votes1.3K
GitHub Stars26.0K
Forks3.5K
Rails API
Rails API
Stacks95
Followers142
Votes16
GitHub Stars5.1K
Forks275

Elixir vs Rails API: What are the differences?

Developers describe Elixir as "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. On the other hand, Rails API is detailed as "Rails for API only applications". Rails::API is a subset of a normal Rails application, created for applications that don't require all functionality that a complete Rails application provides. It is a bit more lightweight, and consequently a bit faster than a normal Rails application. The main example for its usage is in API applications only, where you usually don't need the entire Rails middleware stack nor template generation.

Elixir belongs to "Languages" category of the tech stack, while Rails API can be primarily classified under "Microframeworks (Backend)".

"Concurrency" is the top reason why over 124 developers like Elixir, while over 4 developers mention "Great for quick decoupled apps" as the leading cause for choosing Rails API.

Elixir and Rails API are both open source tools. Elixir with 15.6K GitHub stars and 2.22K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Rails API with 5.26K GitHub stars and 293 GitHub forks.

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Detailed Comparison

Elixir
Elixir
Rails API
Rails API

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.

Rails::API is a subset of a normal Rails application, created for applications that don't require all functionality that a complete Rails application provides. It is a bit more lightweight, and consequently a bit faster than a normal Rails application. The main example for its usage is in API applications only, where you usually don't need the entire Rails middleware stack nor template generation.

Statistics
GitHub Stars
26.0K
GitHub Stars
5.1K
GitHub Forks
3.5K
GitHub Forks
275
Stacks
3.5K
Stacks
95
Followers
3.3K
Followers
142
Votes
1.3K
Votes
16
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 174
    Concurrency
  • 163
    Functional
  • 133
    Erlang vm
  • 113
    Great documentation
  • 105
    Great tooling
Cons
  • 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
Pros
  • 5
    Great for quick decoupled apps
  • 5
    Lightweight
  • 3
    Simply the best
  • 2
    Soon to be merged into core Rails 5
  • 1
    Logging by default
Integrations
No integrations available
Ruby
Ruby

What are some alternatives to Elixir, Rails API?

JavaScript

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

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.

PHP

PHP

Fast, flexible and pragmatic, PHP powers everything from your blog to the most popular websites in the world.

Ruby

Ruby

Ruby is a language of careful balance. Its creator, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, blended parts of his favorite languages (Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp) to form a new language that balanced functional programming with imperative programming.

Java

Java

Java is a programming language and computing platform first released by Sun Microsystems in 1995. There are lots of applications and websites that will not work unless you have Java installed, and more are created every day. Java is fast, secure, and reliable. From laptops to datacenters, game consoles to scientific supercomputers, cell phones to the Internet, Java is everywhere!

Golang

Golang

Go is expressive, concise, clean, and efficient. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel type system enables flexible and modular program construction. Go compiles quickly to machine code yet has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. It's a fast, statically typed, compiled language that feels like a dynamically typed, interpreted language.

HTML5

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.

C#

C#

C# (pronounced "See Sharp") is a simple, modern, object-oriented, and type-safe programming language. C# has its roots in the C family of languages and will be immediately familiar to C, C++, Java, and JavaScript programmers.

ExpressJS

ExpressJS

Express is a minimal and flexible node.js web application framework, providing a robust set of features for building single and multi-page, and hybrid web applications.

Scala

Scala

Scala is an acronym for “Scalable Language”. This means that Scala grows with you. You can play with it by typing one-line expressions and observing the results. But you can also rely on it for large mission critical systems, as many companies, including Twitter, LinkedIn, or Intel do. To some, Scala feels like a scripting language. Its syntax is concise and low ceremony; its types get out of the way because the compiler can infer them.

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