As the name suggests, it’s an epic battle between decades-old native programming languages and the recent functional programming languages like Erlang and Elixir. We’re not going to list down the differences between the functional programming paradigm and Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) paradigm; instead, we’ll show you the advantages of our spotlight Erlang and Elixir. After reading this post, you will learn the benefits of functional programming with Elixir and Erlang.
Erlang – Battle Tested
- Erlang has been in production applications for more than 30 years.
- Erlang’s community Support is still getting better each day and minute as you read this article.
- Erlang powers most of the robust systems that handle millions of users.
- Erlang in-built libraries are far more self-sufficient to create and deploy applications instantly.
- Thirty years of programming needs and pressure ensured that Erlang is the base for many other functional programming languages.
- OTP (Open Telecom Platform) is a set of standard tools that shows the robustness of Erlang.
An excellent article by a programmer using Erlang:
Erlang is Fault-Tolerant
For many of you, who don’t know what is fault-tolerant, let us put it in simple terms:
Suppose you have an application with process A and process B; if the process Braises an exception or error, your whole system might have been brought down unless you have defensively coded every awful situation. As a Human, we’re always prone to mistakes.
This is where Erlang shines. According to Joe Armstrong (Fondly known as Father of Erlang), the motto of Erlang is: LET IT FAIL.
Oh my goodness! What’s, is that? I know what you’re thinking; let us jump in straight to the point. In Erlang, the processes are lightweight and very similar to OS threads, isolated from each other. So when any process fails, only that process gets affected, and the rest of the system stays intact.
Erlang is Concurrent
In this Era, all programming languages have some supporting library to support Concurrency. Still, Erlang has in-built support for Concurrency, and since its process threads are lightweight, it can handle more concurrent process/requests with commodity hardware.:
For example, Tens of people with minimal infrastructure designed WhatsApp, and yet, it supported more than millions without breaking a sweat, and it still is.
We can give you many companies using Erlang to power their systems. For an exhaustive list of companies, Companies – Powered By Erlang.
After the innovation of docker, the main selling point of Erlang, or a less used or underrated feature of Erlang, is its ability to upgrade Code without stopping the application. Other programming languages need to stop their systems from bringing the new changes to effect, but Erlang does it with ease without stopping the application. A few more features, such as pattern matching, immutability, and others, are used everywhere in Erlang, but let’s get through with our primary goal.
Elixir is one of the most popular languages built on top of Erlang VM. The reasons for its popularity are:
- Elixir has the goodness of Ruby in terms of Syntax. (Ruby is still one of the best web development frameworks)
- Elixir has the goodness of Erlang in terms of BEAM (Compiled Code of Erlang), OTP, and Erlang VM.
- Meta-programming (Simply put, Code that writes Code)
- Pipe Operator (Pass the result from one operation to another without intermediate storage/variables)
- Mix Tool (Toolkit for app releases, upgrade, update, etc.)
- Nerves Project (Embedded Systems – Elixir Projects)
- Phoenix Framework and Ecto (Fully Functional Web Development Framework)
Every day, the community support is growing, and recently Elixir released its latest planned features, complete version 1.9 and Jose Valim (Creator of Elixir) has announced that the community will actively ship new releases every six months with improvements and fixes through the Elixir by now as a language is complete with self-sufficient packaging and releases.
Migrating to Elixir
As pioneers in Elixir, we are proud to say that we have helped almost 40+ clients to ship their existing applications to Elixir within a short period. We have multiple stages for supporting you if you need to ship a part of your application or the whole application itself:
- Free POC to prove our Capability
- Product / Feature Understanding (Business Analysis)
- Product Planning / Mapping Features
- Choosing the Right Set of Frameworks or Tools
- Choosing the Best Persistent Storage (SQL or NoSQL)
- Product / Feature Development
- User Access Testing
- Production Release
The above process is a proven process that we have followed with every client. All are happy with the new structure that can support substantial traffic loads without exercising a significant need for resources.
We hope you enjoyed reading the blog and understood why you need to switch to Erlang or Elixir! If you’re looking for support related to migration or if you have development needs, then we remain willing and available to offer expert consultancy to help you get your products to market faster while using fewer resources. You can contact us, and one of our expert consultants will reach out to you at your convenient time.