bodhilogic
I watched a video in the forum (which I can’t find now) about someone generating pretend OOP code for Elixir as a joke and jab at OOP.
That video got me thinking…
Is it possible to use macros to roughly translate an OOP, web-framework, PHP application into Elixir?
I’m not talking generating 100% correct and compile-able Elixir but rather, a library of macros to do most of the heavy lifting of the conversion, followed by whatever amount of manual code clean-up is necessary to get the Elixir code compile-able/runnable?
Failing that, has anyone ever tried to convert a large PHP web application into Elixir? What were the gotchyas and pain points?
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dimitarvp
The library should be this: OOP.
OOP in the BEAM VM (and thus also Elixir) is mostly made possible by tuple calls. Relevant and good discussion: Tuple Calls.
However, Erlang OTP 21.0 is released and, well:
Not sure if the OOP library is making use of those; there should be other ways but IMO the OTP 21 release signals that the Erlang maintainers are not focused on supporting such mechanisms of the BEAM and thus, indirectly, are not interested in emulating OOP. I am not informed about the exact reason though (most likely a technical and not a conceptual one I’d guess), just giving you some pointers if you want to research further.
Last Post!
bodhilogic
Thanks for your answer.
I wasn’t looking to mimic OOP behavior in Elixir, but rather take PHP code that happened to be in a OOP paradigm and rewrite all of the PHP code (ignoring the mechanics that enables the OOP to work correctly) into Elixir code.