It really depends where you're coming from. If you're from the enterprise world I'd expect you'll find the ecosystem limited for anything else than web related, maybe even for enterprise web integrations. If you're coming from something even more niche (for web) like Haskell you'll think the ecosystem is flourishing.
Libraries are generally of good quality and reasonably well documented. The community is very energetic and supportive. Moreover, there's an exceptional range of libraries and solutions available for certain problem domains in which the Erlang platform excels such as distributed concurrency and soft real-time applications in general.
If the problems you work on fall outside of the web sphere Elixir is not a good fit generally.
I can’t agree about the "just web dev" part. After using Elixir extensively in embedded devices it’s been fantastic. Some libraries are lacking, especially scientific. Still I find the time implementing say, polynomial curve fitting, to be more than compensated for by the robustness of the architecture and avoiding the quagmire of OOP code. It’s actually kind of fun to me using Elixir/BEAM for data processing.
Fair enough, I should've put it more general like "distributed computing". Something that does networking stuff and prioritizes low latency instead of high throughput.
I also work in the distributed messaging space and so far my experiments have shown elixir to be able to keep up with our scala stack with the advantages of no thread tuning and much easier debugging. So I'm curious why this keeps popping up.
My point was rather that that's where Elixir excels.
Throughput is always a compromise with latency in garbage collectors and schedulers.
Elixir prioritizes low consistent latency with its garbage collector and preemptive scheduling. Whereas many other systems, such as Haskell's GHC compiler/runtime prioritize high throughput instead for better computational performance.
All the computations have to run inside a process in Elixir. Erlang's platform constrains each process so that any single process cannot hog all the resources available. Therefore, you need to split the computation to many processes when you do CPU intensive work. And processes carry message passing overhead, leading to reduced maximum throughput.
Something like lots of small messages with minimal processing (think: chat) over a bunch of network connections sounds like the ideal sweet spot for Elixir.
Perhaps it’s in reference to compute throughput or disk io? BEAM doesn’t do quite as well in those areas. Not bad but ok. I just did some micro benchmarks on matrex compared to numpy and surprisingly the Elixir nif’s were about 10% faster on my MacBook. Dirty threads have helped nif’s on providing compute throughput too.
I would love to use Elixir for simple non-demanding 2d games. I love the language syntax and i think it will work great for these use cases. Unfortunately, Elixir ecosystem seems to be all about webdev only.
I would say there are at least 4 subgroups that are active in the Elixir community: distributed systems (alongside Erlang), web dev (Phoenix, Plug, etc), data pipelines (GenStage, Broadway, etc), and embedded systems (Nerves, Scenic, etc).
Libraries are generally of good quality and reasonably well documented. The community is very energetic and supportive. Moreover, there's an exceptional range of libraries and solutions available for certain problem domains in which the Erlang platform excels such as distributed concurrency and soft real-time applications in general.
If the problems you work on fall outside of the web sphere Elixir is not a good fit generally.