When would be a good use case for Elixir or Erlang?
1 Like
- You want to learn it
- One of your requirements is scalability
- One of your requirements is distrubuted computing
- None of your requirements is fast number crunching
To explain a bit:
Just for the sake of learning, I gave erlang (very old version) a try and used it as my language of choice for 2 programming contests at my university.
Both contestants I provided to these contests were in the better half of all participants, the winter '15/16 entry was even placed third!
Disecting the participants entries in the lecture free time after the contests, did show, that my algorithms were bad and basic for the given problems. Only the fact, that erlang gave me the ability to distribute my workers evenly and easily over the available cores, while still beeing able to have a central instance which does hold some state, helped alot. Some very naïve random treewalker, started 2 times per core, an ETS as cache, and the global state, which does remember the best score so far and it’s path, only printing a solution if the new score is better than the last known.
This did increase the probability of hitting the right path in a way, that other participants with better/faster algorithms and implementations weren’t able to reach.
5 Likes
