elt547
Closest thing to "Ruby Under a Microscope" for Elixir
I really enjoyed the book about ruby’s implementation. I know there’s nothing quite the same for elixir, but is there something in the right direction? At this point I don’t have enough patience to pore over the source haphazardly.
At the same time I constantly find myself running into questions resulting from a lack of understanding of the underlying machine. Is there a collection of “elixir implementation” resources somewhere?
Most Liked
benwilson512
The BEAM Book: Understanding the Erlang Runtime System is a fantastic resource for understanding the BEAM itself. It’s focused on erlang but it applies equally to Elixir.
christhekeele
Not that I know of, though I hope to be proven wrong!
There are really 3 aspects of Elixir’s “implementation” you might be interested in:
-
The underlying BEAM virtual machine used in both erlang and Elixir:
- The erlang blog has some great posts about this, ex this article.
- The BEAM book already posted is also great!
-
The erlang-implemented compiler for Elixir, and Elixir’s AST:
- There’s actually… not a lot out there on this. I’ve had to read through, and even tinker with, the compiler before, but there are scarce few resources. That’s reasonable since it’s sort of a private API, but I know I would have loved more resources!
-
The standard library and related design decisions:
-
The Elixir blog has some good articles; these days it’s mostly release announcements and case studies, but a few of the earlier ones dig into this a little, ex this article.
-
It’s far more dialectic than a cohesive presentation of anything, but there’s a decade of language design discussion on the core mailing list. You can search just about anything Elixir and see how it blossomed into being.
-
Other resources of note:
- A great crash course to OTP (which is the sort of erlang stdlib/framework for concurrency) for Elixirists is Designing Elixir Systems with OTP.
- Learn You Some Erlang is an introduction to erlang itself, but also dives into OTP a bunch.
- Also by Fred Hébert, Erlang in Anger is a great resource for debugging and fine-tuning your running systems.
Popular in Chat/Questions
Other popular topics
Categories:
Sub Categories:
Forums
Popular Tags
- #ecto
- #liveview
- #troubleshooting
- #learning-elixir
- #deployment
- #library
- #erlang
- #testing
- #genserver
- #mix
- #absinthe
- #remote-other
- #otp
- #plug
- #how-to-question
- #macros
- #postgres
- #channels
- #elixirconf
- #exunit
- #discussion
- #code-sync
- #javascript
- #podcasts
- #onsite
- #dialyzer
- #docker
- #authentication
- #umbrella
- #full-time-contract
- #podcasts-by-brainlid
- #ecto-query
- #elixir-ls
- #phoenix_html
- #iex
- #blog-post
- #graphql
- #genstage
- #ai
- #websockets
- #supervisor
- #advent-of-code
- #elixirconf-us
- #distillery
- #processes
- #forms
- #api
- #metaprogramming
- #security
- #performance








