I’d like to see better tooling for exploring and understanding both the static and dynamic structure of complex Elixir (et al) systems. People talk about how Elixir systems can have millions of processes, but generally this involves a lot of replication. So, in Rich Hickey’s terms (e.g., Simple Made Easy), it doesn’t complect things very much.
The real challenge (IMHO) is making it easier to comprehend the relationships among thousands of data structures, files, functions, process and message types, etc. Observer hints at this when it draws diagrams of supervision trees, but that is only one type of connectivity. Each instance of message transmission or process spawning has the potential to create new relationships among sets of entities (e.g., CPUs, nodes, processes).
I’ve imagined setting up a system that could harvest these relationships from static (e.g., code) files and dynamic (e.g., trace) data, then record them in (say) a graph database such as ArangoDB or Neo4j. This would make them available to generate diagrams, sets of interlinked web pages, etc. There is also the possibility of using an LLM to examine and explicate this information. And a pony…
