yep I agree but as @jung-hunsoo said you can get this in different way like putting this on K8s or in AWS lamda …
mkunikow
wanton7
Let’s say you have large app/site/service and you have this background task queue that’s goes into bad state because of programming error where it can’t recover without restart. How would Kubernetes detect that only that background service is down if most of the app still works? Even if you add a way for Kubernetes to detected it then it would still need to restart whole app and not just that background task queue. That restart might be disruptive for users or other services connected to your app.
Whole Erlang platform was designed with fault tolerance in mind. I don’t think it’s ever possible for Kubernetes offer the same. To even get close you would need to split app to lots and lots of microservices (containers) and that will bring it’s own complexities.
Also nothing stops you from using Kubernetes with Elixir for extra fault tolerance.
jung-hunsoo
First I didn’t say “Fault tolerance is shitty”. The feature is not bad actually, but it’s not unique and awesome. No one will deny that feature. Restarting is definitely the first-aid handy cure in the unstable communicating infra environments; from within an app to the outside interaction.
Of course it sometimes go wrong; I experienced the fault tolerance which was trying DB connection over and over with CPU consuming hike.
As I said above, Elixir has some features that the other languages generally excluded. (I already have an idea which the Elixir would do the best. This is one reason I don’t leave the Elixir away.)
And the performance and benchmark is important as well. Please don’t judge other on your personal opinion.
If the Elixir is best, then why this elixirforum is running on Ruby on Rails, instead of Firestorm?
This is what I expect the Elixir world need to change. It’s so conservative that seem to hesitate or refuse to improve and learn from other languages.
mkunikow
Yep I think this is the point of K8s to have micro services . Nobody puts monolith app into one container… 
Back to your problem I would put task to into queue and if worker will crash ,the other worker would pick this task .. For example AWS has something like Amazon SWF - Cloud Process Flow Development - AWS
But Yes I agree there is alternative way to program this on Elixir without cloud infrastructure like K8s
But you can get also fault tolerance with cloud infrastructure.
AstonJ
Because Discourse uses Rails and they chose Rails because Sam Saffron and other members of team are Ruby experts (also Elixir was in its infancy back then).
There’s no doubt in my mind we could build a ‘better’ forum in Phoenix, but forums take a lot of time and effort to get right. It took the Xenforo team 3 years before I felt it was ready for a production site and Discourse two years (plus 1 in private dev) before I felt the same with it. Both teams are renowned and were working on their platforms full time - yet it still took this long because forums are hard to get right, and that’s nothing to do with the language really, it’s more about the vision and the time/resources you have to bring that vision to life
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dimitarvp
Mostly because Jeff Atwood, the creator of the one and only StackExchange network, is rich and has all the time in the world to tackle projects as he sees fit.
People have been known to make fantastic apps in Perl back in the day. Yet nowadays most programmers wouldn’t touch it with a 3 meter stick.
Language has nothing to do with it.
Popularity rarely correlates with quality.
jung-hunsoo
Right. That’s what I’m saying.
Recent PaaS provides full orchestration thanks to the Docker and K8s.
Elixir can handle some part of them in native. This is a big advantage I think.
But it cannot handle DBs, OS level, and HW changes, which limits Elixir’s usage in real world.
jung-hunsoo
Yeah I totally agree. That’s how the field works. Popularity and Success come with productivity not curiosity.
I knew there’s already discussions to migrate to Elixir as a backend of this forum. Firestorm is(was) a nice try.
Reason I questioned is, that’s one of the FAQ that newcomers and decision makers will have. How many and long this responses can persuade them?
dimitarvp
I agree having this forum be written in Elixir would be a powerful marketing move!
Truth is though, all of us are too damn busy. 
That says nothing for the quality of Elixir itself. It only says that busy people are using it. 
I’d be glad to work on such a project if I didn’t have to think about money. Hell, I can’t even start a few of my library ideas so far.
adrianrl
I didn’t say “Elixir is best”, in fact any programming language that targets the BEAM can benefit from fault tolerance, it’s not an Elixir’s exclusive feature. By the other hand, software like Discourse, Wordpress, vBulletin, PhpBB… it’s much more robust than any other new solution you can come up with, so, expect Elixir to be a solution for your needs, not a general one. If enterprise demands real-time general solutions, I’m pretty sure Elixir + Phoenix would be a good fit, but right now Node.js is ahead. Forums or blogs are basic in terms of functionality, they wouldn’t take much advantage of Elixir’s main features, so it would be a waste of time reinventing the wheel (from a business point of view).
It’s totally fine if you don’t consider fault tolerance being necessary, but others may have a different opinion. Every tool has its own use cases, I wouldn’t use Elixir because its performance, but for helping me to create robust software with an enjoyable syntax.
I didn’t judge you or others, indeed performance is important, but my point is that benchmarks will never be fair, they are ok as a reference, but you shouldn’t take seriously those number metrics. Like I said, performance is relative and depends on various things, for reference see this well-known benchmark from TechEmpower: TechEmpower Framework Benchmarks
Node.js is apparently faster than Elixir right? But I do expect a service doing much more than serving a “Hello, World” message to all of my clients, and when concurrency is involved, Elixir outperforms Node.js by far. So this benchmark is misleading for people who doesn’t understand when a tool shines and when is worth to use it, also a fast language isn’t a cure for inefficient implementations.
For any low level task you can use Rustler and take the advantage of Rust’s features.