"The BeamAsm JIT-compiler has been added to Erlang/OTP and will give a significant performance boost for many applications. The JIT-compiler is enabled by default on most x86 64-bit platforms that have a C++ compiler that can compile C++17."
Having worked with erlang for some time now, https://www.erlang.org/eeps/eep-0049 is _very exciting_ to me. One of the issues that I have with the codebase that I'm in is deep nesting, which could be solved with this feature. Very compelling.
"This is the most general control flow in this document, being fully flexible with regards to which values it can handle. This was done in part because there is not a strong norm regarding error or valid values in either the Erlang nor Elixir APIs, at least compared to other languages here.
This high level of flexibility has been criticized in some instances as being a bit confusing: it is possible for users to make error-only flows, success-only flows, mixed flows, and consequently the ˋelseˋ clause can become convoluted."
Thanks to the EEF for funding my work on the float to string algorithm!
And also, if you wonder if you could do it for your current platform of choice, please do not engage. Inside float to string conversion lies madness...
I've seen more than once recently an engineer saying that software solutions outside of the Serverless ecosystem (FaaS, DB, etc) is "the new legacy". And that cloud providers have solved all the pains that Erlang was supposed to address.
What's your feeling on this? Elixir sounds very compelling to me, but I worry that I might be going in a direction that's not where the industry is going.
People also overestimate what “the new” is, constantly. Otherwise, PHP would be dead by now rather than flourishing.
Serverless is essentially PHP in CGI mode, with a lot of marketing behind it. There are certainly places where it’s beneficial.
Servers and databases are not going away anytime soon. They are simply too effective for what they do.
The “everything is legacy crowd” hasn’t been correct about almost anything in my lifetime. Mainframes are still going strong. SQL databases are better than ever and the NoSQL crowd has largely died out.
90% of the cloud ecosystems of today are just doing what Java app servers were doing in the late 90s.
Erlang and the BEAM offer a set of trade offs that happen to be ideal for a lot of server based use cases to make hard things really simple. Probably not going to take over the world but if it fits what you do you probably won’t want to go back.
yeah, that was rather curious. Similar to how XML died out. Not with a bang but with a whimper. Not that NoSQL or XML are completely gone today, just like PHP. But suddenly one day you recognize these topics are no longer appearing on HN or elsewhere. Then you realize you're getting old and... oh my god... we're actually stuck working in a fashion industry and nothing matters, life is meaningless, and all this is dumb dumb dumb.
When HN and other techies find a new hammer they end up beating that hammer against every problem they see. Right now it's SQLite. I love SQLite. But man. Can we quit talking about it for one fucking day already? This is probably how it felt to be an Erlang fan when Facebook bought WhatsApp. I remember the decades of Joe Armstrong talking about Erlang on Usenet and no one caring. It's just cargo cult with no thought behind it. WhatsApp was successful using X, so if we use X we must be successful. People have this perception that Python is new and modern despite being, relatively speaking, the same age as Perl. Erlang was cool long before WhatsApp. It's really quite old tech.
> SQL databases are better than ever and the NoSQL crowd has largely died out
Especially with json types in Postgres for example. I can store data that’s suboptimal to use traditional databases to access (think complicated and varying form data) but retrieve it and reference it from table relationships traditionally.
> I've seen more than once recently an engineer saying that software solutions outside of the Serverless ecosystem (FaaS, DB, etc) is "the new legacy".
There's, as I see it, three different kinds of legacy: (1) code that has an inordinately costs to maintain and especially update to changing requirements because it lacks tests, documentation of existing business intent and/or design, or otherwise has lost institutional knowledge needed for nontrivial work, relying on the foggy memories of a high priesthood increasingly, over time, working through ritual without understanding, (2) software with deep and fundamental dependencies on platforms or external components that are no longer supported or no longer available, and (3) software which doesn't meet the current arbitrary tech platform decisions of the organization using it, but which has no fundamental problem preventing maintenance or use.
In lots of places, software that isn't adapted to a particular serverless architecture that the org has adopted is now the third type of legacy.
> And that cloud providers have solved all the pains that Erlang was supposed to address.
They haven't, though for some use cases, the parts of the stack Erlang would be most useful for implementing are the parts you are likely to just get from a cloud vendor (that's not true of all use cases, though.)
> Elixir sounds very compelling to me, but I worry that I might be going in a direction that's not where the industry is going.
Elixir is probably not the best bet if your concern is to direct the most focussed possible effort learning the things that are most likely to dominate the largest share ofnthr general software dev marketplace in the near future.
To that end, cloud platforms like fly.io[0] provide first-class support for Erlang/Elixir and related frameworks. If the industry is converging on Erlang-like solutions, it makes sense that Erlang is a natural fit.
Serverless systems in almost every implementation are still stateless or limited stateful-serverless (the best examples are probably Microsoft's Durable Functions or Flink's Stateful Functions - there's also solid attempts by the Akka folks).
These are largely built on top of either a stream processing (in case of Flink) or some flavor of Actor model based on event sourcing for peristence.
What I'm getting at is that you'd build a serverless system on top of Elixir/Erlang/OTP and be served well by its mature actor model implementation and excellent distribution options. See https://eigr.io/ .
The cloud provided options are interesting for some experimental / tactical use cases but I don't yet trust their abstractions to not be leaky and they typically come with vendor lock-in trade offs.
- the supervisor system in Erlang/Elixir is relatively complex. It goes much beyond the "restart my service" when it crashes but allow to restart some processes, without restarting the service, and in a specific order to keep the system coherent.
- local and remote calls behave the same in Erlang/Elixir, allowing to start with a monorepo having different Erlang "apps" than run on the same node, but then running the different apps on different nodes in the future, once the application, scales. This can be done very little changes to the application.
A lot of popular web frameworks have their take on how to arrive at the same goal which is to be able to create responsive feeling sites without writing a lot of JS and creating API backends.
Rails has Hotwire Turbo (which is technically back-end agnostic), Laravel has LiveWire, there's also HTMX which is a bit lower level and back-end agnostic. There's also Django Unicorn and Rails Stimulus Reflex.
All of these solutions let you return HTML back from your server and partially update areas of a page while writing no-to-little JS. They're all implemented differently but for a huge classification of web apps the implementation doesn't matter.
After jumping between Phoenix and Rails for quite some time (years), personally I find Hotwire Turbo's implementation and overall using it extremely intuitive, it "just works". It's been legit one of the best development experiences I've encountered. The best part about it is that it works with any back-end too, so you're not even limited to Rails. DHH and the Rails team never cease to amaze me in what they release to the world.
I'd actually characterize it the other way around: Elixir and Beam give you most of the benefits of serverless with better portability and lower costs.
Also, meta: don't worry too much about where people tell you the industry is heading. 1) They don't actually know, 2) it's much more conservative out there than you might think. Even when new paradigms do gain traction, they pretty much always augment rather than replace, for a good long while at least.
If you're wanting to use Elixir, it's not going to be nearly as mainstream as, say, Node, but fly.io has support for Elixir apps (to speak of cloud), and I think there's some cool stuff going on in Elixir myself.
Of other note is that Erlang seems to enable folks that use it to punch above their weight class when it comes to running services internally and such.
Serverless is far from the only valid way to run things these days.
While Serverless does address some of the points which were the design goals of Erlang, it doesn't address them all. In no particular order:
Hardware interaction is more or less non-existent in the world of Serverless.
Timing/Latency is not really controllable. It's at the whim of your provider.
FaaS doesn't support very large systems well. It's far more about scaling down than up.
Erlang is functional for a reason: it minimizes faults. Quality follows.
Complex feature interaction is limited in the stateless serverless world.
Cloud providers tend to solve for a different set of problems, which is fine. But I'm going to claim that many of the things Erlang was designed to solve runs dual to the problems in the cloud space.
I will bet real money Erlang and elixir will be around and doing just fine in a decade. I would not make that same bet about any cloud services provider.
One current advantage: FaaS is sold below cost by every cloud provider at the moment, so if you can design your app to take advantage of it, you'll save $$$.
Don't know how that'll hold up into the very long term though...
I highly doubt they are sold below cost - when I've checked, the costs are actually higher than a regular VM instance for the equivalent amount of compute.
One good business cycle in the XaaS spaces might disabuse those people of that notion. Even on more stable providers, the whateveraaS products are a good solution for some cases, but far from panacea.
I taught myself Erlang last year and loved it until I tried to write an application. The OTP documentation, while voluminous, was confusing and seemed to have important omissions, and I found little if any community.
I know there's a lot of power there. Whatsapp was written in OTP and had something like half the world using it with a development team of maybe 12.
I'm glad to hear the community is bigger than what I found. I don't actually remember that search process. What I remember clearest was running into the brick wall of the OTP documentation.
I mean we already got a stable 25% or more improvement, to the point that Jason is faster than NIF based json library... we already saw massive perf improvement with the JIT
Readit News
* The JIT now does type-based optimizations based on type information in the BEAM files.
"The BeamAsm JIT-compiler has been added to Erlang/OTP and will give a significant performance boost for many applications. The JIT-compiler is enabled by default on most x86 64-bit platforms that have a C++ compiler that can compile C++17."
Also great if you have the option of deploying on AWS Graviton or similar.
(HN mods: feel free to delete this comment or my comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31426002, since they're the same content)
The EEP doc calls it out:
https://www.erlang.org/eeps/eep-0049#elixir
"This is the most general control flow in this document, being fully flexible with regards to which values it can handle. This was done in part because there is not a strong norm regarding error or valid values in either the Erlang nor Elixir APIs, at least compared to other languages here.
This high level of flexibility has been criticized in some instances as being a bit confusing: it is possible for users to make error-only flows, success-only flows, mixed flows, and consequently the ˋelseˋ clause can become convoluted."
And also, if you wonder if you could do it for your current platform of choice, please do not engage. Inside float to string conversion lies madness...
What's your feeling on this? Elixir sounds very compelling to me, but I worry that I might be going in a direction that's not where the industry is going.
People also overestimate what “the new” is, constantly. Otherwise, PHP would be dead by now rather than flourishing.
Serverless is essentially PHP in CGI mode, with a lot of marketing behind it. There are certainly places where it’s beneficial.
Servers and databases are not going away anytime soon. They are simply too effective for what they do.
The “everything is legacy crowd” hasn’t been correct about almost anything in my lifetime. Mainframes are still going strong. SQL databases are better than ever and the NoSQL crowd has largely died out.
90% of the cloud ecosystems of today are just doing what Java app servers were doing in the late 90s.
Erlang and the BEAM offer a set of trade offs that happen to be ideal for a lot of server based use cases to make hard things really simple. Probably not going to take over the world but if it fits what you do you probably won’t want to go back.
yeah, that was rather curious. Similar to how XML died out. Not with a bang but with a whimper. Not that NoSQL or XML are completely gone today, just like PHP. But suddenly one day you recognize these topics are no longer appearing on HN or elsewhere. Then you realize you're getting old and... oh my god... we're actually stuck working in a fashion industry and nothing matters, life is meaningless, and all this is dumb dumb dumb.
When HN and other techies find a new hammer they end up beating that hammer against every problem they see. Right now it's SQLite. I love SQLite. But man. Can we quit talking about it for one fucking day already? This is probably how it felt to be an Erlang fan when Facebook bought WhatsApp. I remember the decades of Joe Armstrong talking about Erlang on Usenet and no one caring. It's just cargo cult with no thought behind it. WhatsApp was successful using X, so if we use X we must be successful. People have this perception that Python is new and modern despite being, relatively speaking, the same age as Perl. Erlang was cool long before WhatsApp. It's really quite old tech.
Especially with json types in Postgres for example. I can store data that’s suboptimal to use traditional databases to access (think complicated and varying form data) but retrieve it and reference it from table relationships traditionally.
Many of Elixir’s strengths are Erlang’s strengths.
I wouldn’t hesitate to learn some Elixir if it’s interesting to you. It’s not as pervasive as other languages but it’s not niche either.
Full disclosure, it’s been such a wild success for my team at New Relic the last 5 years that I’m very biased :)
There's, as I see it, three different kinds of legacy: (1) code that has an inordinately costs to maintain and especially update to changing requirements because it lacks tests, documentation of existing business intent and/or design, or otherwise has lost institutional knowledge needed for nontrivial work, relying on the foggy memories of a high priesthood increasingly, over time, working through ritual without understanding, (2) software with deep and fundamental dependencies on platforms or external components that are no longer supported or no longer available, and (3) software which doesn't meet the current arbitrary tech platform decisions of the organization using it, but which has no fundamental problem preventing maintenance or use.
In lots of places, software that isn't adapted to a particular serverless architecture that the org has adopted is now the third type of legacy.
> And that cloud providers have solved all the pains that Erlang was supposed to address.
They haven't, though for some use cases, the parts of the stack Erlang would be most useful for implementing are the parts you are likely to just get from a cloud vendor (that's not true of all use cases, though.)
> Elixir sounds very compelling to me, but I worry that I might be going in a direction that's not where the industry is going.
Elixir is probably not the best bet if your concern is to direct the most focussed possible effort learning the things that are most likely to dominate the largest share ofnthr general software dev marketplace in the near future.
[0]: https://fly.io/phoenix-files
These are largely built on top of either a stream processing (in case of Flink) or some flavor of Actor model based on event sourcing for peristence.
What I'm getting at is that you'd build a serverless system on top of Elixir/Erlang/OTP and be served well by its mature actor model implementation and excellent distribution options. See https://eigr.io/ .
The cloud provided options are interesting for some experimental / tactical use cases but I don't yet trust their abstractions to not be leaky and they typically come with vendor lock-in trade offs.
Also:
- the supervisor system in Erlang/Elixir is relatively complex. It goes much beyond the "restart my service" when it crashes but allow to restart some processes, without restarting the service, and in a specific order to keep the system coherent.
- local and remote calls behave the same in Erlang/Elixir, allowing to start with a monorepo having different Erlang "apps" than run on the same node, but then running the different apps on different nodes in the future, once the application, scales. This can be done very little changes to the application.
Some great innovating Elixir projects:
Oban: https://getoban.pro/
Oban Demo: https://getoban.pro/oban
Livebook: https://livebook.dev/
Rails has Hotwire Turbo (which is technically back-end agnostic), Laravel has LiveWire, there's also HTMX which is a bit lower level and back-end agnostic. There's also Django Unicorn and Rails Stimulus Reflex.
All of these solutions let you return HTML back from your server and partially update areas of a page while writing no-to-little JS. They're all implemented differently but for a huge classification of web apps the implementation doesn't matter.
After jumping between Phoenix and Rails for quite some time (years), personally I find Hotwire Turbo's implementation and overall using it extremely intuitive, it "just works". It's been legit one of the best development experiences I've encountered. The best part about it is that it works with any back-end too, so you're not even limited to Rails. DHH and the Rails team never cease to amaze me in what they release to the world.
That anybody claiming serverless has "solved all the pain" is definitely trying to sell me something.
State is suffering, and life is stateful, even after you're long dead and garbage collected.
Also, meta: don't worry too much about where people tell you the industry is heading. 1) They don't actually know, 2) it's much more conservative out there than you might think. Even when new paradigms do gain traction, they pretty much always augment rather than replace, for a good long while at least.
Of other note is that Erlang seems to enable folks that use it to punch above their weight class when it comes to running services internally and such.
Serverless is far from the only valid way to run things these days.
Hardware interaction is more or less non-existent in the world of Serverless.
Timing/Latency is not really controllable. It's at the whim of your provider.
FaaS doesn't support very large systems well. It's far more about scaling down than up.
Erlang is functional for a reason: it minimizes faults. Quality follows.
Complex feature interaction is limited in the stateless serverless world.
Cloud providers tend to solve for a different set of problems, which is fine. But I'm going to claim that many of the things Erlang was designed to solve runs dual to the problems in the cloud space.
Just because the industry is willing to waste money on tech they’ve outgrown doesn’t mean you need to.
Don't know how that'll hold up into the very long term though...
There's a lot of great stuff in the BEAM ecosystem, I would caution on writing it off too fast
I'm glad to hear the community is bigger than what I found. I don't actually remember that search process. What I remember clearest was running into the brick wall of the OTP documentation.
Elixir in Action.
The Little OTP Book.
Designing Elixir Systems with OTP.
Pragmatic Studio's Elixir OTP course.
(Thanks you to Lukas and all others who work on this)
Deleted Comment