Elixir is not owned by Big Tech

I personally think that golang falls more or less in the same category as typescript. Google has a track record of not addressing any community feedback and pushing their agenda, that can be seen clearly about them not addressing a critical issue of polluting types with nullable values, something that even old languages like c# managed to address.

Another case was when I stumbled upon the period when they were making an active effort of maximally constricting running embedded binaries in an android application. There was no logical reason anyone but google would benefit from such a limitation.

I notice this has been submitted to HN. If people want to upvote it then we can participate in such discussions as “What’s wrong with implementing ‘not being owned by big tech’ on the JVM?”

Just want to say for the record that this is something that matters to me a lot, and it’s one of the reasons I write Elixir every day. Thanks for keeping it real everyone

Elixir is small, Rust is big, Go is much bigger.

In terms of how often these languages used, Elixir has much smaller share than Go which is one of “default” languages for server-side web software. That’s a fact, I think no one here would argue it.

Why is it like this?

I think that two biggest things that Google did for Go were

1. Created a brand of the language which is “made and used in Google”, “created by ex-Unix devs”. Those who want to be as successful as Google now rewrite their projects in Bigtable and Go (lets put aside the fact that it doesn’t work like it, because important thing is that people think that it does) and those who want to work in Google now learn Go.
2. Provided top-level engineers core team with top-level salaries. I am not saying that Elixir/Erlang core team is not top-level, I am saying that they lack the Go budgets. They can’t just hunt the MIT students to implement the preemprive concurrency on unix signal handlers. They can’t just provide support for the Google-scale projects. If you open the OTP team blog on new JIT, they say that they chose asmjit as a backend because it was small enough to support and extend. At the same time Google supports LLVM and Go compiler which is written from scratch.

It is important to note that Go language itself is not a breakthrough and most of the feature it offers are pretty simple and well-known in the industry.

How it affects the industry?

Well, Go has broader share, more projects using it, more developers using it, thus more opensource, wider ecosystem. Important thing is that Go was born in Google, but it is now everywhere and even if Google disappears, the language will continue to live. And it all boils down to the key situation: when someone is making a decision about the language for their backend and compares Go vs Elixir it is seen as “default” vs “exotic” where Go is perceived as a less risky, “default” one language

If you are a huge company with an infinite firehose of cash it is not difficult to will a new programming language into existence. I think the first company to really do this was Sun, which spent hundreds of millions advertising Java back in the day. Twenty years later it totally worked - people still use it!

For the record, I think the biggest thing Go did was easy cross compilation. This is something we still really struggle with, and for the most part it relegates BEAM languages to docker containers on the server. There are tools like Burrito, which help, but it would be nice if we could natively bundle to an actual static binary. I am veering off-topic here, though

99.9999999% of Go is running on Linux servers. Most of it is x86_64 too.
I don’t know the real number, to be honest, but that’s my assumption xdd)

I don’t know if you are aware but direct linking to Hacker News submissions actually tend to mean incoming upvotes from that source gets ignored, and it might factor into whether a post gets blocked for vote manipulation/botting.

HN is weird and particular to avoid being too heavily gamed. I would prefer not linking the thread if you don’t mind. The site and the commenters is how it is but the spread is good and useful in promoting Elixir.

I suppose Oracle is slowly fading into no longer being a proper megacorp. Java will become indie eventually

Oh man, I did not know that. TIL and I’m sorry.

I think it’s very important to specify in the detail what is the actual issue. BEAM files are architecture agnostic, you could simply change the runtime for the right architecture and everything would work as expected. The problem comes from using native binaries, which are all the result of NIFs to c/c++/rust etc. All ecosystems that “cheat” in this way will suffer from this, python being a prime example. The easiest way to solve this is to have precompiled binaries for the right architecture and this is what a lot of projects that rely on NIFs are doing.

Even go itself suffers from this, just like rust. Once they try integrating with e.g. C they also need to fiddle around trying to handle the layers for cross compilation – the reason for people opting for zig to deal at that point to enable true cross compilation.