Who would you like to see write an Elixir book (split thread)

[oldpond]

I would like to see someone write the Elixir version of Agile Web Development with Rails.

[OvermindDL1]

@tmbb

That would be nice, bit would it be really necessary? If you’re willing to copy everything you can work with a GIL. From what I unferstand, the BEAM has a GIL too. Everything is copied between processes (maybe with the exception of ETS - I still don’t grok that very well). Without a GIL I assume you’d be more efficient because you might be able to implement Rust-like semantics and mutable state shared across cores.

GIL in OCaml is like GIL in Python, it is not like any of the locks in the BEAM at all. What it means in OCaml is just like in Python is that OCaml code can only be running at once per thread (although external calls release it, like in Python too, allowing you to get concurrency that way, which is decently fine in OCaml even more so than Python with how much crazy-faster OCaml is over Python).

@tmbb

But I think that Rust has a type system that’s strictly more powerful than OCaml’s, so it might be impossible to implement safe memory access across cores in OCaml? This is just a conjecture, I don’t know enough about this to know for sure…

Nope, Rust’s type system is strictly weaker than OCaml (and I’m even not including unsafe). Rust’s type system was more based on Haskell, which is far more limited than OCaml’s (hence why it has hundreds of language extensions to be able to do stuff that is trivial and fast in OCaml). OCaml is easily the most powerful HM typed language out. Now when you start getting to dependent typing and such like Idris, that is a whole different field. ^.^;[quote=“karmajunkie, post:20, topic:10234”]
Not at all—a lot of technical books start out as blog series, and I’ve bought more than one freely-available text to either support the author’s work or to have a more convenient form factor than lugging around dead trees (I seem to be one of the few who prefer electronic texts over paper for technical writing.) I’d particularly like to see something from you on strong typing—benefits, how to introduce it into a codebase in reasonable ways, how to play well with weakly typed languages, maybe a case study, etc. Having it all in one place instead of scattered forum posts would be worth paying for on its own merits.
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I keep meaning to write blog posts on these exact topics… Always busy it seems though… >.<