Elixir – HUGE Release Coming Soon

https://genserver.social/notice/AQIfjB7SQcuEwPGEAC

by gregors • 4 years ago

135 77 4 years ago

genserver.social

sudhirj• 4 years ago

So is this a joke or is something actually on the roadmap?

SirGiggles2• 4 years ago

I don't think Jose has had any announcements in the past that were jokes.

fud1012• 4 years ago

Any good guesses?

worthless-trash7• 4 years ago

terminal output for phoenix liveview.

throwawaymaths6• 4 years ago

Well crap, I've been writing that all week

worthless-trash7• 4 years ago

A new "relup" process for kubernetes deployments.

worthless-trash7• 4 years ago

Automatic function/task distribution across beam nodes.

worthless-trash7• 4 years ago

Native system target compile for beam/elixir.

toast0• 4 years ago

The JIT could probably be abused to make that happen, on amd64 and arm64 anyway

xcdzvyn• 4 years ago

I suspect there's (understandably) a 0% chance of this ever happening, but it sure would be huge.

beck5• 4 years ago

replacement for dialyzer?

worthless-trash7• 4 years ago

IIRC there already was a replacement from whatsapp. Ive heard good things but not used it myself.

I'm mistaken, the FAQ ( https://github.com/WhatsApp/eqwalizer/blob/main/FAQ.md ) mentions that its not a replacement.

conradfr3• 4 years ago

Finally, externally visible module constants (i.e attributes)!

Ok, probably not, but one can dream.

josevalim4• 4 years ago

Zero-arity functions are your externally visible module constants. :)

throwawaymaths6• 4 years ago

Module constants are externally visible by using Module.register_attribute

H12• 4 years ago

Something LiveView related, is my guess.

Perhaps it's getting a new feature, like PWA support? Or maybe the API is hitting 1.0?

wefarrell• 4 years ago

“must be the introduction of mutability and OOP!”

Hilarious

natrys• 4 years ago

Or Global Interpreter Lock.

biermic2• 4 years ago

Maybe something more basic. Like GOTO's

tiffanyh2• 4 years ago

I thought Elixir was "feature complete".

https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2019/06/24/elixir-v1-9-0-releas...

Granted, that doesn't mean it won't be worked on. But it does implies nothing "huge" will be happening.

sb8244• 4 years ago

It doesn't mean that the thing will be in the Elixir language. Nx was teased in a similar way and ended up being an external library.

duffyjp• 4 years ago

That's what I'm thinking too, unless José has a secret Elixir branch. Might be a brand new tool.

ixtli• 4 years ago

What it likely means is that it won’t be a change to the language, but the addition of something stdlib or tooling related.

threeaccents• 4 years ago

I hope its a big update with static types

zach_garwood• 4 years ago

That would be neat! I would really like it if added optional typing like Python or PHP.

tiffanyh2• 4 years ago

I thought Erlang lacked a type system.

How would this work since Elixir compiles into BEAM byte code (via Erlang Abstract Format)?

suprfnk• 4 years ago

I thought so too, but Jose Valim says "never before seen on Elixir or the BEAM", while Gleam exists and Jose undoubtedly knows about that project:

https://gleam.run/

throwawaymaths6• 4 years ago

Also meta has a static typing system for Erlang. Also, dialyzer exists. So if it's "never" he means set theoreic types, but there are incomplete set theoretic type libraries for elixir

sph2• 4 years ago

IIRC José recently said he was was gonna spend some time thinking about Elixir's approach to typing, so that's probably it.

My hope is a smaller runtime that works well for CLI tools. I'd love to use Elixir for small scripts I'd ordinarily use Go/Python for.

hinkley2• 4 years ago

I had an idea years ago when I still had the young man’s dream about writing a programming language. It came after I took over a J2ME project that was trying to do a great deal of functionality in an 85K jarfile.

That idea was that there should be a little language inside of each big language that is used to implement the self hosting aspects of the language, and then a small set of additional libraries would provide a usable embedded variant of the ecosystem, good for small places and things that have to start quickly.

andy_ppp2• 4 years ago

Yes, but there’s a PhD student working with Jose on this and I think the timeline was 18 months. My guess is it’s a joke around how stable everything in the Elixir world remains compared to other constantly evolving ecosystems.

codesnik• 4 years ago

I've seen his comment somewhere (on reddit?), it's not.

vasergen• 4 years ago

static types is the main thing that keeps me from putting more time into learning / using elixir.

Milner08• 4 years ago

Same. I would love to see it get static types.

epolanski• 4 years ago

Me too.

Every time I read statements like this from Jose

"This brings another discussion point: a type system naturally restricts the amount of code we can write because, in order to prove certain properties about our code, certain styles have to be rejected."

I can't but think few things:

- by compilers (in this case static type checkers) laws we all know that there are valid programs that won't satisfy the type checker and viceversa there's only a handful (none being production or development ready) of compilers powerful enough to infer all code bugs

- limiting the expressiveness of a language isn't necessarily a bad thing

I've noticed that people with a huge background in dynamic languages tend to have a natural refusal for static types. Lispers are a community with such an attitude, even the typed lisps like typed/racket seem to be born more to please people wanting typecheckers and academics than the userbase itself.

But I, and my mind, work the other way around: I want to think about the types first, I need them to express my domain and my DSLs, so I need an expressive type system able to translate my thoughts and validate all of my program with nothing but types. It's possible in plenty of languages (most famous one is TypeScript with its declare keyword) to do type-driven development and I can't really function without it.

Once a program has been well modeled, once I've seen the APIs, then and only then I get into implementation and it is by far the part I spend less time on.

Every time I read a lisp dialect without static types (most of them) my mind just doesn't work properly, I can't follow much. And I really believe that the lack of commercial success for many of these languages derives from how poorly non statically-typed languages scale when klocs and number of maintainers of a project start increasing.

jimbokun• 4 years ago

Would that make it more difficult to implement the BEAM?

anshul• 4 years ago

He has been teasing this for a couple of months now. This cryptic twitter post[1] would suggets something related to nx[2] as numbat is their logo and that is the alt text on that tweet.

The most out of the box thing I can think of is that one of the image generative models has been ported to elixir. That would be insane! That numbat twitter image is suspiciously 512x512.

[1] https://twitter.com/josevalim/status/1583551565381914624 [2] https://github.com/elixir-nx/nx

jasonjmcghee• 4 years ago

Doesn't sound out of the box to me- sounds like a pretty good guess.

gfodor• 4 years ago

ah, seems pretty clear you probably figured it out. very cool!

josevalim4• 4 years ago

Hi everyone! I want to align everyone expectations and say this is not related to the Elixir language itself but rather the Elixir ecosystem.

The language has been stable for years and non-minor features always discussed upfront through several proposals. With that said, if you are interested on the work happening on types, I wrote recently about it here: https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2022/10/05/my-future-with-elixi...

This announcement is about a new project, which we are very excited about and working on for months. We hope to officially release it tomorrow (Thu UTC). We are dotting the "i"s and crossing the "t"s right now.

I was definitely not expecting this to make to the front page, I should perhaps be more careful the next time. :)

insane_dreamer• 4 years ago

the Elixir metaverse? ;P

xcambar• 4 years ago

The potion of youth?

aliqot• 4 years ago

Disappointed that it's not about the language itself, but congrats nonetheless. Looking forward to seeing what you all have done.

SirGiggles2• 4 years ago

Can you at least give us a little tease as to what domain the new project is targeting?

dark-star• 4 years ago

Is it related to NFTs? Crypto? Blockchain?

The announcement sure sounds one of those "we're joining the NFT hype train and it will be AWESOME!" type of announcements...

birracerveza• 4 years ago

If it's related to cryptocurrency HN is going to explode.

It's not, but it would be hilarious.

hoosieree• 4 years ago

I hope it is, because I've been putting off learning Elixir for too long and I want to feel like my procrastination has been justified.

biermic2• 4 years ago

Maybe a proper debugger?

dmix• 4 years ago

(Off-topic) As much as I love decentralization these Twitter alternatives have some really awful UIs. Feels like stepping back in time, although that's not always a bad thing.

They should get some of the cryptobros to help, they always had amazing designs for their useless services.

ArcMex• 4 years ago

Thanks, Jose. Really looking forward to it.

dang• 4 years ago

I'm sure it will be interesting but for HN discussion purposes let's wait until it actually exists.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

Elixir – HUGE Release Coming Soon

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