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Things to know about Elixir programming language


Software Development

What do you mean by Elixir?

Elixir is known to be the most popular functional programming language. It appeared first in 2012. Its creator José
Valim, has gone on to build it along with the Erlang Virtual Machine known as BEAM. This happened for a better reason.
Erlang is found to be an efficient, productive and concurrent coding language. He wished to have his own, very new programming language. There have been many successful web development languages. In recent years, Elixir has won the favor of the audience. Let’s go on and learn more about what is Elixir programming language, future of Elixir, Elixir development, Elixir app development, Elixir for UI, Elixir web app development and Elixir Phoenix mobile app development.

What Makes Elixir Better?

As of 2012, we can note that there have been nearly 96 Elixir releases. The latest stable release, which is version 1.7.3 was found to be released in August 2018. Even when it is a young programming language, we can see that Elixir has shown better repository results. Coming back to the question, what is Elixir? Elixir is known to be a programming language running on the Erlang virtual machine (VM). We can also notice that Elixir was created on top of Erlang with a notion to solve any issues pertaining to concurrency which had often existed in  all the previous backend generation solutions. It also would be sharing Erlang abstractions meant to build and distribute many fault-tolerant applications. Erlang has the ability to drive Elixir’s capabilities. We should understand that Erlang is a 30-year-old language. It was built to handle many kinds of global telecom systems with a notion to handle several future-forward technicalities and abilities. We can also see that Think zero downtime running with self-healing capabilities would be built-in. You can also handle any in-place application upgrades while it is a part of the production. The ability where you can push code updates on live would provide this app with incredible efficiency. Every engineering team can face more kinds of increasing demands when they want to solve more difficult business problems. They can tackle this with many advanced technologies. The latest and newest programming languages would often overwhelm them. Meanwhile, their other application would also be expected to perform at the topmost level. We can see that scalability, flexibility and speed along with reaching and maintaining all these optimal performance attributes would require something which would not pose any risk. This way, Elixir, supported on top of Erlang, is a strong platform leveraged by multi-billion dollar corporations.

Additional Benefits of Programming with Elixir

When you can make use of a clean, formal and familiar syntax with a more mature tooling system, you can notice that Elixir occupies an easy to work feature. This language would be incorporating more built-in unit testing as well as documentation while you want to make sure that the software works properly. Some of the other common benefits are:

Pattern matching — This is nothing but an incredibly powerful feature that would be replacing more imperative code. This has made it declarative, which makes the code less prone to any kind of error. This also allows the code to be extremely readable and maintainable. Instead of writing code describing how to extract any data from a few structures, any developer would simply have to write a pattern matching the data structure and the process directly. This way, we can get the extraction done automatically and immediately.

Memory — The memory management feature and architecture in Elixir would be supporting its overall ability while you want to scale in a linear manner. Each and every process has the ability to manage its own memory. There would also require very less processing time to clean up your “garbage” code. With all this happening, the application execution would never cease to continue. With the help of a multi-processing machine, many other work can happen in parallel using a process that would undergo garbage collection.

Scalability — We can see that Elixir software applications would require everyone to handle efficient processes. This can let you leverage all the possible CPU cores. This way, the Erlang VM would let you handle more resource distribution in an automatic manner. In the last year, multi-core CPUs were found to be extremely expensive. Nowadays, we can notice that its cost has seen a significant reduction. All this has made Elixir the best choice.. Know more about Elixir programming language, future of Elixir, Elixir development, Elixir app development, Elixir for UI, Elixir web app development and Elixir Phoenix mobile app development.

Who Uses Elixir?

The topmost adopter of Elixir in recent days has been the Bleacher Report. This sports and sports culture news publisher would want you to publish any breaking news stories to all its app subscribers. Experts noticed that it was averaging to over three minutes between the time it was received by the system to the time it reaches all its readers.  We can notice that the company went on to start it with nearly 150 Amazon Web Services (AWS) instances. The servers did jam with data requests. To add fuel to it, developer overhead also became a huge problem. After moving over to Elixir, Bleacher went on to cut nearly a third of all its AWS instances. The overall response time from every server went on to improve to nearly 10-30 milliseconds. It also reduced the overall servers that were needed. In return, this also went on to better allocate more engineering resources. Owing to all these improvements, Bleacher push notifications reached every subscriber in approximately three seconds. We can see that scalability, flexibility, and speed along with reaching and maintaining all these optimal performance attributes would require something which would not pose any risk. This way, Elixir, supported on top of Erlang, is a strong platform leveraged by multi-billion dollar corporations.

What is Phoenix Framework and How Does It Relate to Elixir?

Phoenix is known to be the most famous web development framework. It has been written using Elixir programming. These are the major Phoenix characteristics:

  • Maintainability
  • Speed
  • Productivity
  • Simplicity
  • Scalability

Downsides of Elixir

The disadvantages of Elixir are:

  • A smaller amount of Elixir programming jobs
  • Lack of Elixir developers
  • Elixir is a young programming language
  • Smaller community
  • Smaller ecosystem

What Projects Can Leverage Elixir Development?

You can go on and hire Elixir developers when you want to create more efficient applications with any features you need. These set of features can consist of any degree of complexity. There would also be cases where Elixir programming would find a place as the most reasonable choice financially and strategically. To put it in specific words, it is the right fit for any project with the characteristics as follows:

  • Concurrency
  • A distributed system such as Blockchain projects
  • Real-time apps such as chatting, instant messaging, financial apps and video chatting
  • Low latency
  • High-end website traffic
  • Scalability

To put it in a nutshell

As time goes on, we can see that both the Elixir programming language as well as the Phoenix framework would be gaining more popularity in the upcoming days. Customer feedback is also positive. They have a better choice to go on with the research. The Elixir benefits are quite impressive. Its future is also extremely bright. What’s more? You should definitely try using this platform.

How can Pattem Digital support Elixir development?

Are you looking for the best Elixir app development company? Get the best benefits from the right Elixir development service providers. Contact our team to learn more about the new opportunities for your app and let’s make it extremely productive and stable as your Elixir app development company by providing the best Elixir development service providers.

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