Discovering the Power of Erlang and Elixir in Scaling WhatsApp and Discord

In a presentation by Theo from t3.gg, the focus is on the Erlang VM and Elixir, highlighting their role in scaling massively concurrent applications such as WhatsApp and Discord. Theo underscores the historical context of Erlang, its concurrency model, fault tolerance, and distribution capabilities. He illustrates how WhatsApp effectively scaled to over a billion daily active users with a minimal engineering team using Erlang. Similarly, Discord leveraged Elixir for its chat infrastructure, allowing for efficient real-time communication. Theo also shares his own experience building a real-time application with Elixir and Phoenix, praising the ease and efficiency of these technologies. The talk emphasizes Elixir’s unique features, such as hot code swapping and lightweight process management, that make it an ideal choice for scalable and reliable real-time applications.