

Ask HN: Operational experiences with Elixir-lang - kangman

Hi, I would like to know some IRL experiences with the use of Elixir-lang with a focus towards the operational aspects of supporting a Elixir based application. Some big wins, weird quirks?  Thanks!
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lectrick
I have built some small projects with it and really like it... in fact, after
getting atop most of the learning curve, it's hard not to want to just work IN
it.

Which is a pretty good endorsement, in my book.

I will say that the production deployment process and tooling is not purely
Elixir at this point (yet). People tend to use the Ruby Capistrano gem to
deploy... which works... but to me gives sort of a cognitively dissonant
experience :)

Another quirk I noticed is that IEEE floating point is not completely
supported, for example there is no "Infinity" value and working with large
numbers will often get you rounding errors. For example, using the Math.pow
function (the ONLY native power function!) ONLY works with floating point
values so using it will get you large-number roundoff errors. Some libs have
been written to manage numeric data better (in my case I literally had to look
up an efficient integer power algorithm and implement it, see
[https://github.com/pmarreck/elixir-
snippets/blob/master/math...](https://github.com/pmarreck/elixir-
snippets/blob/master/math_integer_power.exs)) but the lack of native support
there is weird (and Erlang's fault, really), especially coming from Ruby.

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dpeck
[http://www.erlang-in-anger.com/](http://www.erlang-in-anger.com/) would
probably be a great place to start for this.

------
dozzie
And this is exactly why I dislike Elixir hype. You mistake Elixir as the
primary platform, while it's BEAM/Erlang/OTP, Elixir being merely syntax
wrapper over it.

~~~
dpeck
More than syntax wrapper, but absolutely correct. There is a lot of movement
in the community to refer to things in a BEAM-centric way.

