Assessing Elixir and Cloudflare Workers for Managing Websockets at Scale

The author, NotASithLord7, is considering Elixir and Cloudflare Workers as two viable options for developing an application that requires managing many parallel websocket connections efficiently. They aim to write the application in a way that minimizes the need for custom scalability solutions later on. Both Elixir, likely to be used with the Phoenix framework, and Cloudflare Workers, utilizing JavaScript, are compared for their concurrency handling, scalability, and developer experience. Elixir is praised for its functional design and mature framework (Phoenix), while JavaScript's ubiquity and developer familiarity are noted advantages for Cloudflare Workers. However, concerns about long-term vendor lock-in with Cloudflare's specific use of JavaScript are mentioned. Finally, the author seeks the community's perspective on the practical pros and cons of each approach, especially given the technical differences between the BEAM virtual machine that runs Elixir and Cloudflare's Isolate model.