Cellane

Cellane

Been asked to do a presentation about Elixir - what should I include?

I’ve been asked by my supervisors at work to finally give everyone in the team presentation about “that Elixir thing you can’t seem to shut up about” (:rofl:) so I’m busy preparing slides that would hopefully present a good pitch as to why FP and Elixir is a good idea. I’d be happy to hear about past talks and presentations from other people that I could use as inspiration!

Most Liked

dimitarvp

dimitarvp

Make VERY SURE to outline the runtime’s benefits:

  • Preemptive scheduling (what 99% of the runtimes out there don’t have)
  • OTP’s let it crash and get restored way of work
  • Supervisors!
  • Extremely easy to achieve parallelism and concurrency

Most people just fangirl at the language and a lot of other people are very rightfully not impressed. This decision is only 5-10% about the languages (say because of meta-programming / macros and good libraries). 90-95% of the benefit is the runtime so do your very best to highlight that!

dimitarvp

dimitarvp

Preemptive scheduling

Not one single OTP Process (what in other programming languages are called actors, green threads, fibers) can affect the latency of the others. The average execution time of any given function should remain mostly the same even under heavy load – a huge selling point IMO. That’s why Phoenix apps on $5 worth of servers can handle 2000+ requests a second (while a Ruby on Rails or Laravel vanilla app can be brought to its knees by 100-200 requests a second).

Parallelism / concurrency

Consider this:

def send_email_batch(list_of_emails) do
  # This will receive no more than 100 email addresses
  YourMailSender.send_batch_message(list_of_emails)
end

list_of_emails # Supposedly a very big list
|> Stream.chunk(100)
|> Task.async_stream(&send_email_batch/1, timeout: :infinity, max_concurrency: 20)
|> Stream.run()

:point_up: This will get a big list of emails, break the list into smaller lists of 100 emails each and send each chunk (batch) in parallel, but it never sends more than 20 batches at the same time (the :max_concurrency option of Task.async_stream), e.g. at any given time maximum of 2000 emails are being sent (if we assume this is your email sending provider’s API rate limit and that you want to comply with it).

This extremely transparent parallelism / concurrency is what brought me to Elixir.

AstonJ

AstonJ

Some great thoughts by Dimi and you might also find what Robert wrote in the Erlang Rationale worth a look :smiley:

These EF threads might also contain something of use?

:nerd_face:

Good luck and let us know how you get on :+1:

Where Next?

Popular Backend topics Top

AstonJ
Which server-side languages are you most interested in right now? Anything new or relatively new that’s caught your eye? Maybe an older l...
New
New
First poster: bot
AbstractMachinesLab/caramel. :candy: An Erlang backend to the OCaml compiler. Contribute to AbstractMachinesLab/caramel development by c...
New
New
First poster: bot
The Complete AWS Lambda Handbook for Beginners (Part 1). In the first part of our Complete AWS Lambda Handbook for Beginners, we explain...
New
New
Jsdr3398
I’ve recently become interested in Elixir and all it’s neat perks. And since I’m currently working on a messaging platform; elixir seems ...
New
First poster: bot
proposal: Go 2: permit types to say they may only be created by containing package · Issue #43123 · golang/go. It would be useful to per...
New
New
apoorv-2204
Hi everyone, I’m considering pursuing the Elixir/Erlang certification exam offered by Erlang Solutions and wanted to check in with the c...
New

Other popular topics Top

wolf4earth
@AstonJ prompted me to open this topic after I mentioned in the lockdown thread how I started to do a lot more for my fitness. https://f...
New
AstonJ
You might be thinking we should just ask who’s not using VSCode :joy: however there are some new additions in the space that might give V...
New
AstonJ
I ended up cancelling my Moonlander order as I think it’s just going to be a bit too bulky for me. I think the Planck and the Preonic (o...
New
dimitarvp
Small essay with thoughts on macOS vs. Linux: I know @Exadra37 is just waiting around the corner to scream at me “I TOLD YOU SO!!!” but I...
New
AstonJ
If you are experiencing Rails console using 100% CPU on your dev machine, then updating your development and test gems might fix the issu...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Learn different ways of writing concurrent code in Elixir and increase your application's performance, without sacrificing scalability or...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Build highly interactive applications without ever leaving Elixir, the way the experts do. Let LiveView take care of performance, scalabi...
New
New
First poster: bot
The overengineered Solution to my Pigeon Problem. TL;DR: I built a wifi-equipped water gun to shoot the pigeons on my balcony, controlle...
New
First poster: bot
zig/http.zig at 7cf2cbb33ef34c1d211135f56d30fe23b6cacd42 · ziglang/zig. General-purpose programming language and toolchain for maintaini...
New