Please pardon me for any faux paux. I am 46 and this is my first time on a forum of any kind. I wanted to to get answers from those in the know.
I am a new business analyst and delivery manager, researching Elixir - Phoenix. I came accross this language, commissioning the work for my startup out to a developer who suggested this technology. I saw many comparisons between Ruby and Elixir but not so much for the other languages (Java and PHP). I have already reached out to several authors and developers but with no luck.
Specifically, I wanted to build a matrix illustrating when I would choose Elixir over or stay with Java, PHP, and Ruby. I am looking for an answer in the form of situational examples or specific criteria. Case studies would be a real plus. Any help would be appreciated. I will cite you as a source in my prose as well as link to your site.
I will explain some things i learnt from Elixir. This is what i know i what i know can be wrong.
To answer your question first i need to remind you Elixir will compile to Erlang VM (AKA BEAM) Bytecode, So we can say itâs same as Erlang in runtime.
Upsides
First of all Erlang is super robust. I heard there are telecom switches running Erlang non stop for 20+ years. Thats interesting.
Elixir/Erlang use immutable data structure, means itâs less likely going to suffer from concurrency issues. these issues can happen a lot on Object Oriented languages like Java.
Elixir/Erlang is easily scalable. A client-server architecture in Elixir (like GenServer) is very helpful to convert a monolith application to a micro-service like application without needs for creating an API interface since Erlang can talk between machines easily using Node module.
Elixir has a friendly community and maintainers, I really value this.
In Elixir/Erlang your process (BEAM process) will not get terminated easily. There is no StackOverflow exception. However memory outage can crash whole VM.
Most Elixir libraries are well documented. The code-style encourages programmers to write good docs about every public function by providing nice Tools like ex_docs
Deployment of elixir code to server if fun and safe. Specially the Hot Code Upgrade lets you upgrade you application with zero downtime.
For web development iâve never seen something like plug. plug is awesome.
Erlang/Elixir can handle high loads of traffic like a boss.
Visit here to learn more: 2 Million Websocket Connections in Phoenix
Whatsapp uses Erlang as their main language. Iâve read in their blog that they handled over 2,300,000 connections to a single box. Whats app 2 million connections
Downsides
Elixir is a new language and can change a lot in many aspects. So you need to be more active and up-to-date.
Erlang/Elixir is not a good candidate for applications which rely heavily on calculations. (But you can use a combination of C/C++ or Rust with Elixir if you need calculations. more info here: github.com/hansihe/Rustler)
There are not lotâs of Erlang/Elixir developers. Currently they are not easy to find. It may cause some expenses to your company.
Some Erlang native libraries are hard to understand and Erlang documents are a bit wired in my opinion.
Elixir and Erlang are built with distributed systems and concurrency in mind - for scalability and availability (fault tolerance) few languages come close. Do you need more reasons than this? Elixir offers us a âmodernâ language for the Erlang Virtual Machine - many say that Elixir is the language that the Erlang Virtual Machine deserves (thanks to itâs ânicerâ syntax, tools, frameworks etc).
Personally I think something that is often overlooked by managers is that developers who use languages like Elixir often fall in love with them. This promotes a culture of learning and something I believe leads to significantly better developers âŠthey learn as much as they can because they want to, not because they have to (JS/browsers) or because they are told to (Java/enterprise).
People usually excel at what they enjoy - do you want a team who is passionate not just about your startup but about the technology it uses? Or a team who are not all that inspired by the work because itâs with a language they donât really like? I know what Iâd choose
The problem with this approach is that it is about as useful a numeric score on meta-critic - there are just too many nuances to be captured in a matrix to translate to any particular real world scenario.
One thing that sticks out about the Elixir community is that it is quite up front that Elixir isnât the best solution for everything - and that it really doesnât matter because Elixir/Erlang typically interoperates with various other technologies quite well - Erlang can interoperate with C/C++ and Java code (JInterface) - more direct interoperation with Python seems to be in the works and ultimately you can build the entire system around something like RabbitMQ (which itself is implemented in Erlang) which supports a large number of other development environments.
Technically the biggest âdrawbackâ is that Elixir development is for the time being largely coupled to PostgreSQL - so access to existing legacy information from persistent storage (e.g. Oracle) can require additional effort.
Java and PHP have the edge for non-technical reasons. Both are being frequently taught in post-secondary institutions - so âresourcesâ are typically in good (and relatively cheap) supply. Getting people to work quickly was a primary design consideration behind Go:
It must be familiar, roughly C-like. Programmers working at Google are early in their careers and are most familiar with procedural languages, particularly from the C family. The need to get programmers productive quickly in a new language means that the language cannot be too radical.
Smaller Community: Erlang developers not as prevalent but âthe ones you do find tend to be really goodâ
The sentiment seems to duplicate observations within the Clojure community.
Hiring managers tell us Clojure is their âsecret weapon. It self-selects for smart developersâ.
⊠Clojure lets you do much more with significantly less.
Projects with Elixir/Erlang teams tend to report the same kind of dynamic.
In many ways Ruby/Rails seems to be a cleaner alternative to PHP - as long as the project fits well into the constraints of Rails conventions - i.e. a CRUD web application is sufficient to get the job done (now and in the future).
Ecto by default works with PostgreSQL and MySQL/MariaDB, but you donât have to use Ecto (and I donât in a lot of access), so the additional effort is minimal anyway, Ecto is just a library you can leave out after all.
And slower!
But really, I ran tests between ruby and php (and rust and others) recently and PHP blew Ruby away in speed, not even a close factor (still not close to Elixir though).
Ruby is just slow, every time I see it, it is slowâŠ
It depends on the project. I personally canât make a tech recommendation unless we know what we need to optimize for.
If you need purely computational performance, then Ruby and Elixir would be a poor choice. Iâd go with Java or Golang.
If you need cheap developers that can just plop out almost working code then Elixir would be a poor choice. Iâd go with Ruby, or dare I say it PHP. I would also schedule a complete rewrite once the startup is profitable or falling apart. If you never get there then the tech stack wasnât the problem
Other than those two issues, any of these languages will get the job done. My preference these days is elixir. Itâs productive and stable enough that I would bet my startup on (or yours). That bet also includes being able to bring in experienced programmers and be able to bring in juniors and have them be productive.
The above posts layout the technical reason quite nicely, however, there is one very important factor that needs to be accounted for.
If you hire elixir developers they will be very excited to work with that stack. In my experience, a little bit of tech excitement goes a long way in an early startup. You have maybe two to three years to capitalize on that and then elixir is going to be boring, old, and the defacto standard.
Screw that, Rust runs circles around both!
Rust has some oddly fantastic web server libraries as well, Iâve been quite impressed.
Plus hey, Rust interacts wonderfully with Erlang/Elixir via Ports and NIFâs both!
Ok so, kinda hard to find a case study, but here are my point of view
Java
++ Easy to find devs
++ Easy to find âknown practicesâ
++ Easy to sell to company
++ JVM is quite good at computational heavy stuff once warmed
â JVM is a really really finicky piece of software to operate
â Needs for overcomplex architecture and code to do anything
â Needs for a lot of âBest practicesâ to do the work
â Really hard to separate good from average devs.
â OOP, ie flawed by design
PHP
++ Easy to find devs
++ Easy to sell to companies (Facebook use it!)
++ PHP7 is not too bad at speed at all
++ Easy to deploy
â Broken by design
â Not really meant for long lived stuff
â Hard to operate.
â Hard to keep clean and maintainable
â Really hard to separate good from average devs
Ruby
++ Easy to find devs
++ Gem for everything
++ âEasyâ to deploy
++ Nice for the devs
++ Can be easy to maintain if nicely done
â Flawed by design (OOP)
â Slow. As hell
â Not really easy to operate
â Really hard to separate good to average devs
â Really not meant for long lived stuff
Elixir
++ Nice for the devs
++ A design that make sense (and do not breaks the laws of physics)
++ Easy to maintain
++ Easy to operate and debug
++ Quite fast
++ Ease of interacting with other languages
++ âHabits of solving the hard problem the right wayâ
++ Accept the reality of errors and problems.
â Harder to find devs, but tend to be good
â Harder to find âGood Practicesâ
â A bit harder to deploy
â Meant mainly for longer lived stuff, bad at scripting.
â Hard to sell to other companies (there are case study mind you)
â Not good at computational heavy (but see interactions with others)
There i hope it helps
BTW @OvermindDL1, welcome to the RESF ( Rust Evangelism Strike Force)
I think it mostly depends what problems are you wanted to solve âŠ, and what language has frameworks, libraries you need
Elixir language for building scalable , distributed, fault tolerant system first in mind. Cons: quite new, maybe not all libraries you are looking for can be found, not for numbers crunching.
Java Enterprise language, you can build almost everything from sim cards, adnroid apps, big data to micro services. Libraries mostly for everything. Cons: complicated concurrent system, quite old and keeps back compability. Fortunately there are some modern languages that runs on JVM like Kotlin.
The question is too general you have to describe the problem you are aiming to solve. I think itâs hard to go into more detail than @DianaOlympos provided without knowing the specifics.
Also add in:
â Many of the âknown practicesâ are the opposite of âgood practicesâ.
Iâd say they are pretty easy to find actually, there is actually almost no documentation on how to do things wrong and a lot of documentation on how to do things right.
Youâve not deployed a large Ruby or Java app from scratch have you⊠(It was so nice when discourse setup a docker image as the default way to set it up, holy hell it was painful beforeâŠ).
Lol, Iâve been in it for a while. Iâm still a bit more pro-C++ and pro-OCaml than I am pro-Rust (mostly because Rust has made some *really*stupid* design decisions outside of the awesome borrowing stuff).
Fortunately you can run a Java Node on a BEAM mesh. ^.^
I have deployed some fairly large java apps and I still think the deployment is simpler with java â at least with our configuration where secrets are coming from vault etc pp.
but â at least in our experience â it is easier to read the secrect in java in the start up procedure from vault then with elixir. but our java experience, on the other side, is much better than the one with elixir.
@restack_oslo: I donât have so many experience with Java, but here is what I think:
java < PHP < Ruby < Elixir
Why that?
Java - I donât worked with Java so much, but I tried it and lots of languages like it (for exxample Groovy). For me itâs much more harder to learn and develop. Simple one-line fixes with Groovy/Grails, Java-based editor and deployment (using Tomcat) was like a hell - it takes too more time and itâs not good for old computers.
PHP - Easy to setup, but you need really lots of experience to secure it + you need to control your code really good. I remember true hell trying to help busy administrator in my first work. I was need to reinstall Joomla! and Wordpress sites really often and we waste lots of time on it. Also I heard about lots of security problems with PHP. Itâs why in my first job we was focused on Groovy/Grails and Ruby/Rails.
Ruby - For me it was a really good step forward. Much more secure that PHP and much more faster than Groovy/Grails + Tomcat, but itâs not all we can achieve.
Elixir - One command mix new is just too big advantage for me to even think about return to other languages.
Of course there is no language for everything, but I was really surprised seeing speed of combination Elixir with Rust - itâs awesome work!
This language have too many advantages to describe all in one post (do we have a post size limit?)
Elixir is my choice for future no matter how much job offers it will have. Itâs too comfortable to change decision.
If someone is looking for Elixir developer then, please send me pw
Last time my main project changed status to âside-projectâ and Iâm looking for work in ânormalâ - i.e. 8h/5days per week project.
As @OvermindDL1 says Elixir is modern language with so many of helpful features that will definitely increase your experience with programming.
I donât think so. We have more and more book and tutorials that helps not only with it. I saw lots of questions that asks for something that is already explained very well + I always can ask on forum if I donât understand something. I believe that really good docs and some tools like credo have lots of tips for âGood Practicesâ.
Depends. Someone already created library that helps with writing one file scripts, so basically only count and quality of libraries and projects are limiting us!
In similar questions I recommend to watch materials like it:
As you can see only your skills can limit you when working with Elixir projects.
Please note that wherever you go, to Elixir community, PHP, Java and Ruby, youâll get different answers. You are hanging in forum full with Elixir fans at the moment so weâll be biased towards that ;). On a PHP forum youâll hear PHP is the best!
While in reality, you most likely want to ask this question about individual projects, and consider stuff like time, resources availability, hosting, certifications, deployment, onboarding staff etc etc. Itâs a complicated task, choosing a stack
Elixir offers us a âmodernâ language for the Erlang Virtual Machine - many say that Elixir is the language that the Erlang Virtual Machine deserves (thanks to itâs ânicerâ syntax, tools, frameworks etc).
