What other use cases of Elixir are there other than web development?

Web Dev is something of a broad category these days, in that a whole lot of things happen to have a web interface.

So for example, we use Elixir to manage the upgrade and configuration of industrial sensors. We’ve got a raspberry pi with an Elixir service on it that watches for sensors to connect, handles queueing up data files on them for upload, and then manages state machines for each sensor as they’re upgraded or conditioned.

It also has a web UI powered by phoenix channels so that it can show the status of each sensor live. So it’s sort of web dev, but it may help answer your question.

I have IRC and Discord bots, some servers that manage game servers, a static site generator, and a few more things actively running in either Elixir or Erlang right now that are not web servers.

Telephony of course

I’m using it to send messages to mod_kazoo on FreeSWITCH (but of course this is so that we can interact with it from a web front-end)

I have written a number of non-web projects including:

• Log file parser
• protocol parser
• lots of competitive programming exercises
• a couple simple language intrepeters
• a complex telephony application
• a reliable udp stack
• Asterisk PBX AMI and AGI implementations
• and Emergency call out system (web front end was a small component of the application)
• general purpose scripts

GRiSP - Bare metal hardware for the Internet of Things, specially designed for Erlang

If Elixir doesn’t work on it right now it’s probably just a matter of time.

Forgot one… I have also done some embedded Elixir on a BeagleBone Black board.

Can you point to some good information on how to use Elixir for “day to day” scripts?

For example, I tend to write little programs and integration scripts in Linux shell or Python just because they’re so easy and they’re readily available. However, since I already have Elixir on my servers (because I have a couple of small web apps built and running there), I would like to try writing my glue programs in Elixir.

And taking that a step further, many of my scripts are fired off by cron. The simplicity is great, but I wonder if there’s some BEAM scheduler type pattern I could use with a bunch of satellite Elixir scripts instead?

Hi @michael_teter,

For Elixir command line scripts, I’d look into escripts. I find myself writing them often (for all but the most trivial scripts) instead of bash, ruby, or python despite the erlang dependency because my productivity in Elixir is much higher. They are easy to use… the official docs are here: mix escript.build — Mix v1.20.2 and you can google to find many helpful articles and blog posts.

I guess you could look into something like GitHub - c-rack/quantum-elixir: Cron-like job scheduler for Elixir · GitHub for the cron-like functionality or just keep using cron to fire off your compiled escripts.

I think elixir could be good for developing an AI.

Perhaps. The multi-threated nature maybe? One of the really interesting things about AI development is I really think the conceptual underpinning of a language are likely to influence the personality of the AI…