ElixirConf 2017 included a talk about building a UI “natively” in Elixir that is quite exciting to me! (It uses a port to talk to OpenGL via a small C wrapper). I’m looking forward to the code being released so I can play around with it.
Here’s the link to the forum post discussing the talk that @boydm gave at ElixirConf:
I write mostly GUI business apps, and also need a lot of reporting. The Little Elixir & OTP Guidebook states in the intro that Elixir that Elixir & GUI don’t mix, but several presentations at the Elixir Conf, including the Toyota Way seems to indicate that large companies have embraced Elixir for business apps. Am I barking up the wrong tree here?
A corollary question is whether any of you are using reporting tools, and whether you are writing your ORM in Ecto, if I understand that correctly, or in stored procedures. It seems to me that in order for a reporting tool to interact with the data it would have to be outside of Ecto.
There’s a kind of chicken and egg problem here. IMHO, the BEAM would be a pretty awesome GUI app environment, but it doesn’t have a robust interface to the client windowing API. There is the wx interface, but the problem with putting any GUI library in as a NIF is that it can crash the BEAM.
One way around this is to use the browser and javascript as your GUI interface.
Creating a Port interface to OpenGL is also pretty intriguing. However, I think for Native UI Desktop Apps, Elixir is going to be an uphill battle. There will likely be places where this battle is worthwhile, but I think for most applications the time to delivery penalty will be too great until more of the spadework in library interfaces is available.
What might make more sense is to drive an Elixir app via a GUI wrapper if your underlying problem maps well to what the BEAM does well. (i.e. if your basic problem is “embarrassingly parallel” and I/O limited ) What would scream “Elixir Desktop App” to me is a problem that using the increasing number of cores available on high end desktops would help.
While Elixir will never likely be the fastest on 1 or two cores, once you’ve solved your problem in Elixir it becomes much easier to throw 24 or (128) cores at it and see reasonable speed ups. Right now those kinds of machines are mostly servers, but that level of concurrency will eventually make it’s way into desktop computing.
Here’s Joe Armstrong’s research on GUI options for Erlang: [erlang-questions] My quest for a decent way to make a GUI in erlang
I agree. People are going crazy over component oriented architecture now. Isolating and orchestrating state is selling like hot cakes.
Elixir is designed for this, no? This kind of reactive design.
please do keep us posted, sounds awesome - dream scenario would be an app that you could build for desktop and/or for the nerves kiosk GitHub - nerves-web-kiosk/kiosk_system_rpi3: Nerves QtWebEngine Kiosk system for Raspberry Pi 3 · GitHub
Did you manage to get something working with webview? Sounds like an interesting option compared to electron.
