Elixir and Ruby can talk to each other using Erlix

https://blog.fazibear.me/elixir-ruby-dont-fight-talk-with-erlix-24b0f5ed8d12

by thibaut_barrere • 10 years ago

169 54 10 years ago

blog.fazibear.me

pmontra• 10 years ago

Interesting. Any real world application this has been used for?

mackdaddysly• 10 years ago

I wonder what the benefits of this approach is to say, a json driven microservice between elixir and ruby?

davidw3• 10 years ago

Probably faster and more direct and less fiddling around with encoding stuff in JSON. I'm pretty sure both Ruby and Erlang have richer types than JSON.

sjtgraham2• 10 years ago

Running your applications in Erlang is its own microservices architecture. Each process is essentially microservice that can interact with others on any node in your cluster by sending messages. Everything is handled for your by the runtime. Processes on a different node? No problem, they're easy to discover and if a message does go to another node the serialization is handled for you. Erlang is so powerful I'd actually invert your question.

dfischer7• 10 years ago

I hesitate using Erlang/elixir for this than aws lambda + event distribution. Any thoughts?

dakull4• 10 years ago

the Erlang node, witch is connected to Erlang VM over the network.

Witches are connected to the BEAM? :) funny typo.

Cyph0n• 10 years ago

Well, BEAM is somewhat magical, so... Freudian slip?

15155• 10 years ago

I would like to see a DRB <-> Erlang C Node (but in Ruby) system.

Start Ruby process, get Erlang node.

mmartinson2• 10 years ago

I'd be curious to see if this becomes viable as an interface wrapper for teams that writing new services in Elixir while supporting important pieces of legacy Ruby code. This seems to be the situation in a lot of Ruby shops, and it would be fantastic to see someone getting this working at a big scale and seeing some industry best practices emerge.

enraged_camel• 10 years ago

Yeah, in the most recent Who Is Hiring post, every mention of Elixir also mentioned Ruby somewhere, usually in the context you described.

sjtgraham2• 10 years ago

Most of those postings seem like Ruby shops that have pipe dreams of doing Elixir stuff, some day. I'm skeptical many will get there, which is a shame because Elixir is the most fun I've had writing software.

holydude• 10 years ago

I am not sure why we need to replace Ruby with Elixir. Nor do I understand why it is necessary to write every new code in Elixir. I mean when Crystal gets production ready are you guys going to rewrite everything from Elixir to Crystal ? :-| Elixir is not a substitute for Ruby. It's completely different paradigm and language. Same for Crystal. They just happen to feel like Ruby but are missing a lot from Ruby/Rails ecosystem.

I really like lispness of Ruby and the rails ecosystem. For a lot of things it's still numero uno technology.

dakull4• 10 years ago

The first things that come to mind:

- true parallelism (this is why we need guilds in Ruby 3)

- the BEAM

- functional yet OO at a higher level [0]

- all the Erlang/OTP goodies for free

- Phoenix/Ecto are quite nice frameworks and solid alternatives to the server-side JS world

- “looks” like Ruby though is an entirely different beast

Crystal on the other hand looks more like a Rust alternative to implement almost-as-C-fast Ruby gems. I'm sure it can evolve into an ecosystem but since it's quite far from being stable it will take some time, time in which the Elixir ecosystem will grow because its Erlang foundation already fixed the big issues.

[0] https://www.infoq.com/interviews/johnson-armstrong-oop

misterbowfinger• 10 years ago

Interesting - makes me think of ErRuby:

https://github.com/johnlinvc/erruby

Like JRuby, but s/Java/Erlang.

poorman2• 10 years ago

I don't see any practical use for this. You're just sending text around. This breaks most OTP conventions, you lose insight from the Observer, etc..

If all you want is message passing you should just use something like zeromq which would allow for a lot more than just Elixir to Ruby.

davidw3• 10 years ago

You're just sending text around.

Unless I'm mistaken, it's using Erlang's distribution protocol, which is not 'just text'.

http://erlang.org/doc/apps/erts/erl_dist_protocol.html

As to whether some other form of sharing data between Ruby and Erlang is more appropriate, I'm sure it depends entirely on the application. At $current_job - 1 we used the Java/Erlang libs to let Android and Erlang talk, and it worked pretty well. We did not need other systems to access the same data, or the additional overhead an extra piece of software would have required.

poorman2• 10 years ago

Ah, I see this now: https://github.com/KDr2/erlix#about-the-class-erlixmessage. So I guess it is handling encoding.

P.S. zeromq doesn't require you to run another system, it's just a lib.

felixgallo2• 10 years ago

or http://bert-rpc.org/ perhaps.

rad_gruchalski• 10 years ago

There's even a ruby lib for that: https://github.com/mojombo/bert

elcritch• 10 years ago

Alas, most of the libraries are pretty old and not currently active. But still seems to be a decently simple/useful spec. However, messagepack protocol seems much more broadly supported and some new rock libs are popping up, but no common rpc spec.

Based on those facts, I decided to build a Bert-rpc but using message pack and geared for embedded devices. Just released (as in tonight!) the initial code for an Arduino RPC library. It uses the msg pack for Arduino (https://github.com/HEADS-project/arduino_msgpack), a great little library. Enjoying it much more than most JSON libraries.

It's intended purpose is to make interacting with sub-1ghz radios and be easy to interface with elixir. Only have basic Call and Cast semantics at the moment, but it's only two days old. :-) If anyone's interested in helping, I think C++11 lambda might be a feasible way to create rpc callbacks that non-devs could use (maybe...).

justin66• 10 years ago

I've got something for this... wait for it... Inter-Bandwagon Communication. IBC for short.

rozap• 10 years ago

Hm, not exactly. This is the same model as JInterface, which is built and maintained by Ericcson and has been around for quite a while and targets the JVM. This is nicer than using ports as datatypes "just work". The whole runtime (Ruby or JVM) just appears as an erlang process, which you can send/receive messages to/from.

We use JInterface at work to leverage a bunch of stuff on the JVM that we already built. Integrating it with our Elixir project took less than a day and to be frank there's significantly less fucking around than there would have been had we deployed the JVM functionality as a microservice, and locality is preserved, which is nice.

JInterace (and i'm assuming Erlix because it's the same model) has been a really nice, low friction way to re-use a bunch of code that already works.

amorphid• 10 years ago

Is this more or less useful than C bindings in either language?

ZmyWTR• 10 years ago

Cool, should be very useful...thanks for posting!

dfischer7• 10 years ago

With aws lambda elixir is less attractive to me. I wonder if anyone has similar thoughts?

gamache5• 10 years ago

At Appcues, we use a combination of both approaches.

We have our Elixir backend where we need some combination of:

- Low latency -- Lambda + API Gateway requests typically incur a ~200ms invocation latency

- Persistent connections, e.g. WebSockets

- High performance

- Continuous usage, let's say at least ten calls per second all day every day forever

For everything else, Lambda and API Gateway have been fantastic, even without a framework like Serverless. It's so cheap! It's so convenient! It's so reliable-enough!

But we couldn't get along on a 100% Lambda backend, far from it.

dfischer7• 10 years ago

I agree with this a lot. Especially on the web socket front. I've been thinking of an ideal structure for this. I haven't decided between elixir or bet in with Google and Firebase.

Elixir and Ruby can talk to each other using Erlix

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