I’m using Elixir for every (web) project now specifically because the cost is negligible. I can't think of a reason to use anything else and the agents are _really_ good at writing it, particularly given the excellent structural guardrails that are in place.
Being able to ensure all of the test run freakishly fast async is a huge win too.
I don't get elixir, maybe I'm not ruby brained enough. Too much syntax sugar for me
Elixir is great from a syntax perspective. It gets compared to ruby a lot for some reason but they're nothing alike. Elixir syntax is very deliberate about everything.
The BEAM runtime is the real win. Your options are Erlang, Elixir and Gleam to get the BEAM.
Out of the 3, I prefer Elixir and Jose is a brilliant leader for it.
How often do you need the HA features BEAM can give you in a webapp though?
It’s not the HA features that are the selling point for me.
The combination of lightweight processes with their own HEAP and the preemptive scheduler means that millions of processes can run on the same machine with consistent execution time, no GC pause, and no worry that a single resource heavy process is going to slow down everything else.
The balance tradeoffs allows you to do a lot of things that would otherwise be poor architectural choices.
LiveView is just one example, where you’re able to completely forgo the need for a frontend framework but get all of the same benefits with lightning fast execution times.
There’s a lot of wins that come from it.
From a AI standpoint, functional code is simpler to trace and maintain because the AI doesn’t have to worry about side effects.
The HA perks are a bonus.