Hi all,

In the last days, two things happened:

1. A blog post titled “They might never tell you it’s broken” made the rounds. It’s about how even makers of popular software might not always be told something is wrong.
2. I spent many hours and went through five different Erlang versions trying to run a bog-standard Phoenix app on my brand new Windows 10 box (and I’m pretty experienced with both Elixir and Windows).

If the Elixir/Erlang teams are aware of this, then please feel free to ignore this entire post. But on the off-chance that most Erlang and Elixir committers are on Mac or Linux, here’s me sharing my personal experience:

It appears to me that the Elixir setup experience has gradually deteriorated on Windows to the point that I expect newbies would simply give up. I’ve (helped) set Elixir up on a fair number of Windows boxes over the last 3 years or so, and it seems like a new hurdle is added every next time I try.

Worse, it is my impression that Windows itself is getting increasingly popular among developers again. I worry that my experiences in the last few months are an indication of what any Windows user has to go through to try out Elixir, and that this will hurt Elixir adoption.

This is just too hard. Ideally, running elixir-websetup.exe should be enough to compile and run Elixir code. It used to be, but it isn’t anymore.

To be fair, I don’t think I’m in a good position to help much with this. This post can well be read as the generic “open source user complaining about stuff he’s been given for free”. I just want to make sure that the teams involved are aware that this is going on, because it would suck if everybody thinks that Elixir works great on Windows.

In other words, I’m not sure what the solution is.

If you’re interested in more detail, here’s my experience. Feel free to skip this part, it’s just for context and not important to the core point. Much of the following is from memory, so sorry if I got some details wrong.

When I started on Elixir a few years ago, it was amazing. Get the Elixir installer, it fetches Erlang, copy&paste the magic Phoenix archive incantation and off you go. Awesome!

Then came Phoenix’s Comeonin dependency in Phoenix, which added a NIF compilation requirement, which requires Visual Studio Build Tools (a whopping 4.6gb), but OK. That’s still pretty straight forward, just some hassle. It truly sucks on small computers though, because the build tools are so enormous (4.6gb for a C++ compiler? srsly microsoft?). I wish Elixir had some way to ship NIF binaries from Hex, somehow. BUT! At least this works, and it’s pretty well documented and google-able, even though MS keeps breaking the various download links scattered across the web. This is clearly down to Microsoft making it way too hard to compile stuff for its OS (get this: getting GCC on WSL is faster than getting command-line MSVC running!). But it still impacts Elixir.

Today however, when setting up my brand new laptop, I found myself messing around with five different Erlang versions before I got the right combination of luck. I’m pretty experienced with both Elixir dev and Windows “power usage” yet it took me many hours to get our bog-standard Phoenix backend to compile.

Here’s what I did:

• Elixir websetup installs the latest Erlang. Seems fine, but running mix local.hex exits without output and without doing anything. I can’t mix deps.get without it so I’m stuck.
• Hmm, elixir --version says that it was built on OTP 20. Maybe I need OTP 20? Let’s try that.
• Nop, didn’t help. Turns out that I was running the 64-bit Erlang, which can’t run crypto code and therefore mix local.hex crashes without output. That Erlang bug was closed as a “can’t repro” but I’ve had this exact problem on three clean Windows boxes in the last 4 months. Should’ve taken notes the first 2 times. And I should’ve tried to get that Erlang bug reopened. Will try today.
• OK so, apparently 32-bit Erlang is needed. Fine, I don’t think I’ll need 4GB of RAM anyway. Let’s try the latest, 22.1. Uninstall Elixir & Erlang, install Erlang-32bit, reinstall Elixir. Cool, compiling our backend works, run works, but now I’m getting a Postgrex error that some tuple doesn’t implement String.Chars. Some googling around suggests that maybe it’s a thing with the latest OTP. Not sure that’s the same error, but OK, let’s try.
• Ok so, remove build artifacts, uninstall elixir, uninstall erlang, get erlang 22.0, reinstall Elixir, rebuild. Nop, can’t compile! Calendar.ISO can’t be found. Right.
• Let’s try the OTP Elixir was built with then, but now in 32-bits mode, i.e. Erlang 20.3. Uninstall everything again, install everything again, great! Now it works.

Finally, now it works. Of course, IEx is still the only REPL on my box that doesn’t let me press “up” or “down” to go through the command history, but I’ve gotten used to that by now.

Just to reiterate: I’m not trying to complain about something I’ve been given for free. My company exists thanks to Elixir, so I’m deeply grateful. I think that for lack of time to contribute substantial open source back to the community, the least I can do is make sure problems are noted.

I didn’t make this a GitHub issue because I feel that it’s a more general thing, not a specific bug. Much of it might even be specific to Erlang rather than Elixir (but that doesn’t make it impact the Elixir experience any less).