Which IMHO is very, very unfortunate. BEAM languages, especially Elixir, would be amazing to write client applications in if there was a good rich GUI facility. wxWidgets is not that (just look at the fun the last weeks on the erlang list about this!), but one can imagine such a thing existing. The lack of a good modern toolkit is one of the last things that holds the BEAM forever on headless services.

Concurrency is absolutely huge for modern GUI applications, something we’ve been working around for the last couple decades with one hack or another. Threading is a nightmare, so it is often faked with event loops and async I/O to varying degrees of success.

Good, modern UI toolkits put as much of the UI as possible in threads (QtQuick does this in several ways, as well as putting as much on the GPU as possible) leaving the application code to languish in yesterday’s development paradigms. It would be absolutely wonderful to be able to develop rich client applications with a language that gave you good concurrency out of the box. The other benefits like FP rather than OOP and all the other bits and pieces would be the icing on the cake.

You might be referring to the game InVected we (me and a couple of other guys, some from our company, some from the university) built for the last Global Game Jam, using Unity for the front-end, and Elixir+Phoenix for the back-end, which synchronized a very simple browser application on the user’s phone with the large Unity screen, allowing them to use their phones as ‘joysticks’. It was a lot of fun, and supports 14+ players (that’s as much as we’ve tested it with at the end of the 48h game jam).

I think Scenic it’s the giant step forward we needed to talk about GameDev in Elixir

I wrote about it here