Our Concurrency Superpowers

ElixirConf · June 25, 2025, 1:00pm

ElixirConf US 2024 - Shannon Selbert & Parker Selbert

Welcome to ElixirConf
Welcome to ElixirConf

Try utilizing all CPU cores transparently in Python. Try running a pool of hundreds threads without bloat in Ruby. Try cancelling a process from across the planet in JavaScript. It’s impossible. Trust us, we’ve tried.

Oban couldn’t exist in any other language or runtime. The BEAM’s concurrency story is unparalleled, and Elixir’s ergonomics make building highly concurrent, distributed systems a dream. As a scalable background job system, Oban is by nature a highly concurrent distributed system. It’s a perfect match.

In this talk we’ll investigate how the BEAM’s primitives stack up against what’s available in other runtimes, and why they’re irreplaceable for building a truly concurrent, scalable, distributed background job system.

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