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0 pointscztomsik3y ago0 comments

It's not immutable, there is no messaging, no hot-swap, no supervisors, it's not FP, and it doesn't have transparent support for clustering.

Also, it's not memory-safe, 30ys old, and battle-tested pretty much everywhere.

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ksbrooksjr3y ago

There are definitely trade offs when switching from Elixir or Erlang to Go. If you're a functional programmer who can't live without immutability, or you plan on running a cluster of machines that can communicate with each other and hot-swap code into the running system, then Elixir and Erlang are good choices.

If you have some extremely CPU intensive code, or you like cross compiling to a lightweight binary, or you need static typing (without giving up preemptive scheduling), Go is a decent choice.

Elixir and Erlang are not slow by any metric, but there are faster languages. Discord famously had to augment their Elixir code with Rust for example to scale to 11 million users [1].

[1] https://discord.com/blog/using-rust-to-scale-elixir-for-11-m...

cztomsikOP3y ago

that is much better point, but erlang gives you reliable system by default and you have to try really hard to make it crash, whereas go is just regular compiled language and such programs typically crash more easily/often.

ksbrooksjr3y ago

Erlang is definitely more fault tolerant than most languages, but I've found that static typing tends to catch a lot of errors in development that would otherwise crash an application in production. The compiler won't catch every bug, and you'll still typically have to restart a crashed service periodically (via systemd, or a container orchestrator, or whatever process manager you use), but it definitely helps.

Gleam is a pretty good choice if you need type safety and you want to run on the BEAM https://gleam.run/. It still has the same performance characteristics as Erlang (which it compiles to), but at least it gives you type safety.

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ksbrooksjr3y ago

If you have some extremely CPU intensive code, or you like cross compiling to a lightweight binary, or you need static typing (without giving up preemptive scheduling), Go is a decent choice.

Elixir and Erlang are not slow by any metric, but there are faster languages. Discord famously had to augment their Elixir code with Rust for example to scale to 11 million users [1].

[1] https://discord.com/blog/using-rust-to-scale-elixir-for-11-m...

cztomsikOP3y ago

ksbrooksjr3y ago

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse