September 08, 2023

Understanding Elixir's Low Latency Capabilities

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Understanding Elixir's Low Latency Capabilities

Source: underjord.io

Erlang BEAM Functional Programming Concurrency Phoenix Framework Phoenix LiveView

Lars Wikman examines Elixir's ability to handle real-time operations and maintain low latency, attributes that are fundamental to the Erlang platform on which Elixir is built. Erlang, created for the telecommunications industry, was designed with a focus on consistently low latency, rather than hard real-time constraints, making it ideal for systems sensitive to latency. The implementation of a single scheduler in Erlang's history and preemptive scheduling enabled the system to distribute computational resources fairly and efficiently. Erlang’s system architecture is high-level and dynamic, which is typically counterintuitive to performance; however, it sacrifices some performance to meet its objectives of distributed, fault-tolerant, highly available, and hot-swappable systems. Wikman also highlights how Erlang’s soft real-time design has been integral to the wide usage of Elixir and Erlang in messaging systems, such as RabbitMQ, and applications like WhatsApp and Discord, which require consistently low variance in latency. With the advent of the Phoenix web framework and Phoenix LiveView, Elixir has embraced the real-time and low latency philosophy, which predated modern single-page applications and provides a streamlined way to handle live updates without significant backend and frontend separation.

Creating Custom Credo Checks for Elixir Projects

Paweł Świątkowski explains how to create custom code checks using Credo, the popular static code analysis tool for Elixir. The article covers the process of writing and configuring a Credo check, as well as using tokenization and AST generation to detect code issues.

Aug 29, 2023

An Overview of Elixir's Syntax

In this blog post titled "Unpacking Elixir", Lars provides a thorough exploration of the Elixir programming language, explaining its syntax, conventions, features, and interop with Erlang. Lars discusses various aspects of the language, such as modules, functions, pipes, pattern matching, macros, and more, offering insights and observations along the way.

Sep 01, 2023

Managing Large Files in Elixir Applications

Claudio Ortolina discusses the challenges of handling large files in Elixir and provides recommendations and strategies to mitigate memory-related issues. The post also includes three use cases, along with measurements and approaches for each case, offering a methodical approach for working with large files in similar situations.

Jul 24, 2023