"The combined effect of better architecture and Elixir saved Pinterest..." I appreciate that they also call out better architecture here. People often read these kinds of headlines and think "Oh Elixir is better than python" or whatever.
I remember when twitter had fail whales constantly and they rewrote it from ruby to java I think. At the time everyone assumed it was all ruby's fault, and that might be partly true. But it's also true that the engineers who rebuilt it understood the problem much better now, and knew the major pain points. They also completely changed the architecture to be better suited to the problem. I submit that a lot of rewrites could happen in the same language and still have major gains.
All that being said Elixir is great, and particularly well suited to these kinds of problems.
I remember when twitter had fail whales constantly and they rewrote it from ruby to java I think. At the time everyone assumed it was all ruby's fault, and that might be partly true. But it's also true that the engineers who rebuilt it understood the problem much better now, and knew the major pain points. They also completely changed the architecture to be better suited to the problem. I submit that a lot of rewrites could happen in the same language and still have major gains.
All that being said Elixir is great, and particularly well suited to these kinds of problems.