I have been thinking about GenEvent today when reading the fantastic book “Designing for scalability with Erlang/OTP”. I do not really like it (gen_event, I love the book), in fact, I can hardly justify using it in any but the simplest cases where nothing can go wrong. It is difficult to set up correctly and adjust to different use cases, I think mainly because it runs the handlers in process of manager. But since here are so many great more experienced Elixir and Erlang devs than me, I may as well reach out to get your opinions on the topic. Two questions from myself:

1. Is GenEvent really that bad as I think it is, or do you actually use it and can recommend doing so?

2. What GenEvent alternatives would you recommend?

You already got my opinion on 1, just a quick note on how I have been dealing with events handling now: I use third party gproc lib and implemented my own solution based on it’s pub/sub use case. My event handlers are started as stand alone processes (GenServers with handle_info callbacks in fact) and supervised/restarted entirely separately than my event manager.

I think @josevalim is working on gen_broker (a.k.a. gen_router), and it may be interesting alternative in the future, but I do not think it’s ready just yet.