Elixir is still a new sort of, 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.
Summary
Using Elixir brings many advantages to the picture. It can influence you as a developer positively and open some fantastic job opportunities.
