Posts tagged "elixir"

Introduction to Elixir

Elixir is a very scalable and dynamically functional typed language built on Erlang’s VM. While this application has become prominent in some highly concurrent web applications, many people are still yet very unfamiliar with it. This article will take us through what Elixir is.

The main features of Elixir

– It is built on top of Erlang’s VM; this means that for all of the concurrency tools that Erlang possesses, Elixir has access to it. This has made it one of the most powerful programming languages for building highly scalable systems.

– It has a Ruby-like syntax; If you’ve had to program with Ruby at one time or the other, then Elixir becomes easy for you to navigate. Even though Ruby is a productivity-oriented language, it is deficient in concurrency and performance. However, this deficiency is made up for with Elixir.

– Elixir is highly functional; Elixir is not just process-oriented, but it also has all the constructs you anticipate from most modern programming languages. In addition, an immutable data structure and pattern matching further confers on it its high functionality.

– Elixir possesses dynamic typing in contrast to other functional languages such as Haskell and Scala. This insinuates that typing is checked in run time and not during compilation. This helps to increase the development speed for simple web applications.

Benefits of Elixir

– Concurrency; Elixir utilizes isolated processes and runs across all central processing units, and communicates via messages. In addition, the immutability of the data structure makes it easy to write concurrent programs on Elixir

– Scalability; The processes it possesses also ensure that it scales systems easily, either horizontally or vertically.

– Reliability; Elixir has a different approach to fault- tolerance; the supervisor system can quickly restart the lightweight processes in case of any production failure.

Functional Programming

Unlike some programming languages such as JavaScript or Python, Elixir code is structured in functions and modules instead of objects and classes. Furthermore, all of the data types are immutable. What functional programming does is that it takes advantage of many things such as declarative style of writing codes, pattern- matching and higher-order functions. With all of these, you achieve attendant benefits such as better testing and debugging, easier handling of concurrent programs, better maintenance, and high-level abstractions that simplify coding.

Phoenix 

Phoenix enables you to efficiently churn out web apps while not compromising on either speed or maintainability. The lightweight processes of Elixir are fantastic for problem-solving, especially concerning concurrency and scalability in web services. However, it is essential to note that the ecosystem of Phoenix and Elixir is not as mature and robust as that of Ruby on Rails or Python’s Django, so that one might run into problems. Well, the important thing is that the benefits outweigh the costs.

Elixir: The Right Approach for Modern Web Apps

Elixir not only provides software projects with the performance they require; the programming language also allows apps to assist organizations in ways they never imagined possible.

In this article, we will go through the fundamentals of Elixir, its Erlang structure, and its advantages over a slew of other “latest and best” technologies.

What exactly is Elixir?

Elixir is a computer language for the Erlang virtual machine (VM). Elixir was built on top of Erlang to address concurrency issues in earlier generations of backend solutions. The result is a functional, concurrent language that shares Erlang concepts for constructing distributed, fault-tolerant applications.

The power that fuels Elixir’s capabilities is Erlang. It’s a battle-tested 30-year-old language designed to manage worldwide telecom networks yet has numerous forward-thinking capabilities. Consider zero downtime, self-healing capabilities, and the capacity to manage in-place application updates while running in production. The ability to publish code updates in real-time gives a program a cutting-edge vibe.

What Makes Elixir Special?

Engineering teams are under growing pressure to use innovative technology to address challenging business trials. The newest programming languages frequently overwhelm them. Meanwhile, the apps they are required to deliver are expected to function at the best level possible.

Flexibility, scalability, and speed — achieving and sustaining these ideal performance qualities necessitate a tried-and-true solution that does not pose a significant risk. Elixir, built on Erlang, a technology already used by multibillion-dollar businesses, is precisely that.

Other advantages of Elixir programming 

Elixir is straightforward to use, thanks to its precise, familiar syntax and mature tools system. The language has built-in unit testing and documentation to verify that the software works properly. Other advantages include:

Pattern matching – This compelling feature replaces imperative code with declarative code, making code less error-prone and more legible — and therefore more manageable. To put it another way, instead of creating code that explains how to extract data from a structure, developers create a pattern that matches the data structure itself, and the extraction is done automatically as a result.

Memory: Elixir’s memory management design enables linear scaling. The program never grinds to a standstill since each process controls its own memory, and there is less processing time required for cleaning up “junk” code. Other work can be done in parallel with a garbage collection operation on a multi-processing computer.

Scalability – Elixir software programs aim to be as efficient as possible by utilizing all of the cores of a CPU. There is no need to do anything extra; the Erlang VM handles resource distribution automatically. Multi-core CPUs were formerly prohibitively costly, but their prices have dropped substantially, making them an excellent choice when using Elixir.

Who can Use Elixir?

Bleacher Report was an early adopter of Elixir. The sports and sports culture news publisher wanted to get breaking news articles to its app users as fast as possible, but it was taking roughly three minutes from the time the content was pushed through the system to the time readers could access it. The firm began with 150 Amazon Web Services (AWS) instances, overburdened servers with data requests, and substantial development manpower overhead.

Bleacher reduced a third of its AWS instances after switching to Elixir, and server response time decreased to 10-30 milliseconds. Furthermore, it was able to better deploy engineering resources by reducing the number of servers required. Bleacher push alerts were able to reach subscribers in about three seconds as a consequence of these enhancements.

Elixir is also used in various other industries, including automotive, information technology, and communications and collaboration.

Best Uses for the Elixir Programming Language

Elixir is still a new language, which most developers are afraid of when learning a new language. Thus, since Elixir is based on Erlang, it is fully interoperable, and Erlang’s equipment will be suitable for an Elixir codebase. Though the Elixir community is still young, the open-source libraries Phoenix and Ecto are unique. Phoenix shows an intuitive approach to developing web apps inspired by no other than Ruby on Rails. It offers you an intuitive DSL and a remarkable architecture, ensuring maintainability and productivity. On the contrary, Ecto is a database wrapper taking full advantage of the expressiveness of Elixir. It benefits from the agent model performances ensuring language-integrated queries and giving us a good set of abstractions and utilities for using databases like Postgres.

The connections between Ruby and Elixir

All language has its pros and cons, loyal followers and opponents. Elixir does not claim to be a better version of Ruby neither its replacement. It has another set of goals. Nevertheless, it provides better performance, availability, and scalability. In contrast to Rails, it offers a development site reducing external limitations, which enables it to specify the business protocol instead of creating a place for it. Elixir is a great language, and its code is unique. What is more, it makes use of every CPU core, which means it out-of-the-box uses the whole machine so that we can aim at the business logic instead.

Elixir makes writing tests easy. You work with full functions that receive and return data. The Elixir code quality is explicit thanks to its compiler.

When should you choose Elixir?

Elixir is also utilized by companies with web applications that experience colossal traffic also benefit from it. Some of the well-known Elixir users are:

Bet365

With over 255 million monthly visits, this online gambling and betting website switched to Erland first and then introduced Elixir and Go to stack. The combination of the three languages resulted in a scalable site that can be maintained and managed efficiently.

Inverse

A new website covers topics like science, technology, entertainment, and culture. In 2015, they took Elixir into their tech stack, enabling their website to handle spikes in traffic easily.

Financial Times

Financial Times has more than 1 million paying readers and more than 23 million monthly visits. Serving such a vast number of users demand switching to GraphQL API solution created in Elixir.

RD Station

This digital marketing automation management equipment was designed to enable companies to get more leads, grow and improve sales. Such a solution demands a mix of stable and reliable programming languages, including Elixir, Node, and Python.

Meltwater

Meltwater is a platform for monitoring social media activities equipped with complex algorithms, allowing for tracking down content and comb via millions of blogs, posts, and news. They chose Elixir to manage its effectiveness.

Adobe

Adobe used Elixir in production to develop a user cloud app for a collaborative photography workflow.

Moz

SEO software for better marketing using Elixir to create the back-end for digital marketing and SEO toolset – Moz Pro.

Discord

This instant messaging application for voice, video calls, and text chats chose Elixir to develop a large-scale messaging system with more than 5 million concurrent users.

Motorola Solutions

Motorola Solutions utilizes Erlang and Elixir for mission-critical communication to stay fault-tolerant and reliable.

However, it is worth mentioning that Elixir is one of the ‘nine nines’ languages, enabling the applications developed in it available and responsive regardless of the number of users using it. Elixir code is easy to maintain and grow. Its applications do not crash, even when the code is extensive.

When are we suggesting using Elixir?

As mentioned earlier, Elixir is popularly used by banks and government agencies. Banks handle transactions in real-time and engage in daily tasks such as settlement, reporting, and accountability. When it comes to such advanced operations, functional programming has been proven to be the best approach. Elixir is such a language that it is an excellent choice for software development in the banking industry. Aside from that, it comes with modern syntax, polymorphism, the actor model, meta-programming, etc. It is testable with reliable and robust systems where data is safe from alterations.

Creating middleware with Elixir adds two central values to your software:

  • helps to minimize server costs
  • allows to easily maintain excellent code quality that can run for a while

Functional programming is a proven process for writing quality software that stands the sands of time. , you should consider trying Elixir if you support banks or want to develop such a solution.

Why and where to learn Elixir?

The overall popularity of Elixir is very high as of today, and there may not be too many job offerings for Elixir, knowing this technology is an excellent investment into the future. It is possible that most of the enormous companies will show interest in this technology soon and this could be the opportunity to have a great job. Suppose you are used to working with only object-oriented languages as Ruby Elixir makes you a better developer. In that case, it gives you another perspective on programming, making your brain go into overdrive.

There are plenty of resources to know when it comes to learning Elixir. There is an official website dedicated basically to resources available for learning the language. The best book you can start with is Programming Elixir 1.6. if this is not enough, there is a total Elixir Bootcamp available on Udemy or a free Elixir: you can start programming on the best concurrent language course. Currently, Elixir has almost 900 active contributors on Github, which is present in searches on Stackoverflow. For more resources, you can check the article on learning Elixir.

Summary

Using Elixir brings many advantages to the picture. It can influence you as a developer positively and open some fantastic job opportunities.

Why Choose Elixir For Your Next Software Development Project?

Elixir has become more and more popular in the programming world for a while now. The banking industry has given more attention because of its reliability and ability to manage heavy traffic. Data is frequently tracked, verified, consolidated, and monitored while ensuring complete security with no mistakes. It is also a better choice for scalable applications that require smooth operations.

This article will introduce Elixir as an alternative for popular programming languages, present its essential functions, pros, cons, and why you should consider it in your subsequent development.

What is Elixir?

According to the official Elixir website;

Elixir is a flexible language designed for developing scalable and maintainable applications. Elixir leverages the Erlang VM, runs low-latency, distributes fault-tolerant systems, and is also carefully used in web development and the software domain.

The language was developed in 2011 by José Valim, a former member of the Ruby team. It has a similar expressive syntax look and style. Aside from Ruby, Elixir is created and built upon Erlang. Due to its byte-code compatibility with the Erlang VM (BEAM) – used by companies like Whatsapp, Netflix, and Pinterest – is usable with it and its ecosystem and performances. Elixir is capable of handling huge traffics while delivering high performance and unique features. It was also based on the actor model – a concurrency model used to create systems.

Reg to StackOverflow, Elixir is among the top 10 most beneficial programming languages.

Main features of Elixir

Elixir brings functional programming with immutable states together and an actor-based approach to concurrency. It all is contained in a tidy, modern syntax. So what is the function of this efficient programming language? Let’s look at them together.

Built on Erlang VM

Elixir has access to all the concurrency equipment that Erlang has. It makes it one of the most efficient languages suitable for creating highly scalable, distributed systems while maintaining functions.

Dynamic typing

Elixir has dynamic typing, unlike other functional languages such as Scala or Haskell. Dynamic typing ensures that types are checked not during compilation but in run-time. It improves the development speed for web and mobile applications. What is more, is that static kinds can show in Elixir through type specs.

Ruby-like syntax

If you know how to use Ruby already, you know how to navigate Elixir since their syntaxes feel intensely familiar. Although Ruby is one of the most productive-oriented and concise languages, it lacks performance and concurrency. Those difficulties are solved by Erlang VM, making Elixir the best solution.

A functional language

Elixir and Erlang are frequently characterized as being in a platform of their own (as process-oriented). Elixir also has everything you would expect from modern FP languages, such as immutable data structures, which help with pattern matching for declarative code.

Pros of Elixir:

Scalable

Because Elixir operates on Erlang VM, it can use applications on multiple communicating nodes. It means it is effortless to develop more extensive web, mobile, and IoT apps that can easily be scaled over different servers, leading to better app performance.

Concurrency

The ability to run several methods simultaneously is essential when developing an app used by millions of users. In Elixir, several requests from multiple users can be taken care of simultaneously in real-time with no adverse effects.

Easy to use

Elixir is straightforward to read and write. It uses simple extensions to change data safely and efficiently. Many developers prefer Elixir for their projects, and why many new programmers are also learning it.

Fault-tolerant

Fault tolerance is practically one of the prominent features of Elixir. It offers built-in safety mechanisms that ensure the product work even when something goes wrong. Processes provide any failures to dependent processes are known, even on other servers, so that any challenges are fixed instantly.

Active community

Even though Elixir is quite an upcoming language that developed an active user platform where everyone is willing to assist and share knowledge, what is more, is that there are also lots of tutorials available to help you through the development process.

Pattern matching

Different feature signatures enable making much clearer intentions of how the code should behave in various cases. It helps to make the code clean and concise.

Performance

If you were to go through similar solutions written in Ruby and Elixir, you would get the same result. However, the Elixir solution would be easy to scale and simpler to develop. Read the post How Elixir Helped Me improve App Performance if you want to learn more about Elixir performance.

Domain-driven design

Elixir uses the Actor model as an easy process, which means that all aggregate can be input into a process, and the process itself would guarantee the necessary isolation.

Summary

Functions like scalability, high reliability, and ease of testing within this functional programming language make it the best choice in the banking industry and huge sites like Pinterest, Netflix, and Whatsapp. Thus, the open-source libraries developed by the growing community around Elixir confirm 20 years of tooling experience performed by the Elang community.