Coordinating the Superbowl's visual fidelity with Elixir

https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2025/03/25/cyanview-elixir-case/

by lawik • 1 year ago

644 136 1 year ago

JSR_FDED• 1 year ago

It’s always surprised me how the world of digital video is a cousin of IT yet is impenetrable to people outside the video industry. How they refer to resolutions, colors, networking, storage is (almost deliberately?) different.

walrus01• 1 year ago

People who only ever work with 'consumer' video equipment need extra training and a back-to-basics set of reading material to understand things like the difference between a 420 and 422 color space, or why serious cinema cameras record video ungraded, or what the color grading process in a post-production workflow looks like (and the different aesthetic choices of grading that might be possible). That's before even getting into things like raw yuv/y4m uncompressed video, or very-high-bitrate barely compressed video, generating proxy footage to work with in an editor because the raw is too much of a firehose of data to handle even on a serious workstation....

I would say that unless you have a professional reason, there's very little benefit to the average end-user to do a deep dive into it. If your intention is to spend $7000 on a RED camera and then $13,000 on lenses, gimbal, cage, follow focus, matte box, memory cards etc to make a small and cost effective single camera production package, then by all means, dig into it.

keane• 1 year ago

4:2:0 vs 4:2:2 for anyone curious: https://youtu.be/7JYZDnenaGc?feature=shared&t=101 and https://www.red.com/red-101/video-chroma-subsampling

dist-epoch2• 1 year ago

Grading is abused so much these days, it's like a curse. You have a pristine video chain, only to turn it all into yellow/blue at the end.

davidbou10• 1 year ago

This gives an idea of the parameters we cover for roughly 200 different models of broadcast cameras we might have so far. These are only to tweak the image quality which is the job of the video engineer (vision engineer in UK). We usually don't cover all the other functions a camera has, which could be more intended for the camera operator himself. The difficulty is to bring some consistency with so many different cameras and protocols.

https://pastebin.com/cgeG2r0k

noisy_boy2• 1 year ago

Do you "normalize" the parameters to some intermediate config so that everything behind that just needs to work with that uniform intermediate config? What about settings that are unique to a given device?

ram_rar• 1 year ago

Great to see Elixir gaining traction in mission-critical broadcast systems! I wonder, how much of Cyanview's reliability comes from Elixir specifically versus just good implementation of MQTT? and is there any specific Elixir features were essential that couldn't be replicated in other languages?

zaik• 1 year ago

couldn't be replicated in other languages?

All programming languages can do any task. It's about how easy they make that task for you.

zwnow• 1 year ago

Yea and with that i'd think it would be a pain in the ass trying to replicate BEAM behavior in different langs

thibaut_barrere• 1 year ago

This is true in general but only until it gets false.

For instance, Elixir supports compilation targeting GPUs (within exactly the same language, not a fork).

Most languages do not allow that (and for most it would be fairly hard to implement).

goatlover• 1 year ago

For any finite, computable task, as long as the language has access to the hardware that can perform the task in practical time, assuming the language doesn't present any compilation or memory issues to take advantage of said hardware in practical time for the task to be worth computing.

ghislainle4• 1 year ago

Main developer here.

We use MQTT a lot, it is really a central piece of our architecture, but Elixir brings a lot of benefits regarding the handling of many processes which are often loosely coupled. The BEAM and OTP offer a sane approach to concurrency and Elixir is a nice language on top. Here is what I find the most important benefits:

- good process isolation, even the heap is per process. This allows us to have robust and mature code running along more experimental features without the fear of everything going down. And you still have easy communication between processes

- supervision tree allows easy process management. I also created a special supervisor with different restart strategies. The language allows this and then, it integrates as any other supervisor. With network connections being broken and later reconnected, the resilience of our system is tested regularly, like a physical chaos monkey

- the immutability as implemented by the BEAM greatly simplifies how to write concurrent code. Inside a process, you don't need to worry about the data changing under you, no other process can change your state. So no more mutex/critical sections (or very little need). You can still have deadlock though, so it is not a silver bullet

dist-epoch2• 1 year ago

Have you looked at stuff like NATS/Jetstream instead of raw MQTT?

travisgriggs2• 1 year ago

Which MQTT library are you using? Did you roll your own?

somethingsome• 1 year ago

Hey it's nice to see a very successful business in Belgium in this space!

I work at the university and we build acquisition systems with exotic cameras and screens, do you think we could meet one time to discuss possible (commercial and research) projects ?

dorian-graph• 1 year ago

and is there any specific Elixir features were essential that couldn't be replicated in other languages?

From the article:

“Yes. We’ve seen what the Erlang VM can do, and it has been very well-suited to our needs. You don’t appreciate all the things Elixir offers out of the box until you have to try to implement them yourself.

jerf2• 1 year ago

This is Elixir/Erlang/BEAM's core use case, the thing it was designed to do, coordinating and routing with failover and fallbacks a large number of realtime feeds. The original use case was phone calls, but other than the fact these video streams are much much larger per second, most of the principles carry over.

As much as I am a critic of the system, if this is your use case, this is out-of-the-box a very strong foundation for what you need to get done.

davidbou10• 1 year ago

Yes, this was one of our initial considerations when we first started, and the telecom analogy of the original Erlang development application was one of the main reasons we took this approach. Now, we only "stream" metadata, control data, and status. Even though we manage video pipelines and color correctors, the video stream itself is always handled separately.

For anyone interested in the video stream itself, here's a summary. On-site, everything is still SDI (HD-SDI, 3G-SDI, or 12G-SDI), which is a serial stream ranging from 1.5Gbps (HD) to 12Gbps (UHD) over coax or fiber, with no delay. Wireless transmission is typically managed via COFDM with ultra-low latency H.264/H.265 encoders/decoders, achieving less than 20ms glass-to-glass latency and converting from/to SDI at both ends, making it seamless.

SMPTE 2110 is gaining traction as a new standard for transmitting SDI data over IP, uncompressed, with timing comparable to SDI, except that video and audio are transmitted as separate independent streams. To work with HD, you need at least 10G network ports, and for UHD, 25G is required. Currently, only a few companies can handle this using off-the-shelf IT servers.

Anything streamed over the public internet is compressed below 10 Mbps and comes with multiple seconds of latency. Most cameras output SDI, though some now offer direct streaming. However, SDI is still widely used at the end of the chain for integration with video mixers, replay servers, and other production equipment.

notepad0x90• 1 year ago

What is being used in similar broadcast setups outside of this Superbowl?

imjonse• 1 year ago

According to the article this software is used for all major sporting events.

davidbou10• 1 year ago

Major events use it for all kind of soecialty cameras as they aready have the technology for the main studio cameras. So we had to develop solutions for everything that was not working. And major productions have budgets for all kind of new toys:mini-cams, drones, cable cams, now cinematic look from small mirrorless cameras, slow motion, etc. That opened up a whole lot of possibilities to be creative but you have to be as reliable as the main cameras and aim for the best image quality.

Now the same products are used for very small productions that don't have the budget for any studio camera (look typically at 50k+ for a camera without lens). In that case we try to provide a similar user experience and functions but with much more ffordable cameras.

Finaly more and more live productions are now handled using cine style cameras which don't have the standard broadcast remote panels and that's another area we cover, by combining camera control with control of many external boxes like external motors to drive manual lenses or 3D Lut video processors. Applications are on fashion shows, concerts, theater, Churches, studio shows, even corporate.

In the end Elixir is used for a lot of small processes which handle very low level control protocols. And then on top of that add a high-level of communication between devices either on local networks or over the cloud.

mcintyre1994• 1 year ago

Now the same products are used for very small productions that don't have the budget for any studio camera

Just out of curiosity, what would be examples of very small productions here? Would an independent YouTube channel with great production quality be using this?

laserbeam• 1 year ago

Of course! Of course you have to do color correction on all the different cameras pointed from different angles at a sports event.

I absolutely love reading about hard problems that are invisible to most people.

abrookewood• 1 year ago

Yes, it's one of those super-niche & super important functions that are obvious once you know about them, but would never think about otherwise.

myst• 1 year ago

Why is it super-important?

rekttrader• 1 year ago

It’s the basis for the 99% invisible podcast.... I loved the one about elevators.

ZeWaka• 1 year ago

Without any marketing, it earned a reputation among seasoned professionals and became a staple at the world’s top live events.

Sounds like the entertainment industry. Everyone truly knows everyone, especially when you're working on the same show with the same crew year after year.

It's definitely a family of sorts.

pharrington2• 1 year ago

"Without any marketing" is also an obvious lie, since Cyanview has a storefront website and marketing posts on Linkedin.

caseyohara• 1 year ago

Also this article seems more like an ad for Cyanview than for Elixir. Smells like content marketing to me.

davidbou10• 1 year ago

I don't think it was meant to be taken literally (we didn’t write the article). We’d actually love to do more marketing, we barely have time for it though. We don’t have a storefront website—just a basic site with outdated product info but we dedicate all our efforts to the support section. We post on LinkedIn a couple times a year to reassure everyone that we're still alive, but that’s hardly a real marketing strategy. Currently our sales come from word-of-mouth and industry connections, not much from marketing. Hopefully, we’ll find the time to step it up in the future!

xlii19• 1 year ago

I won’t let a friend start development in Elixir.

Let me get it out: I love BEAM. OTP is awesome and one of the best systems in its kind. I was completely enamored with Elixir years ago as a modern Erlang which excited me to the bone.

It’s no longer the case. When you get into non-trivial things there are many sharp edges and paper cuts. Some from the top of my head:

- it’s impossible to disable warnings - test runs are often highly verbose because libraries ignore them and (as discussed somewhere in forums) warnings are deemed useful so they can’t be disable

- the only way to catch some, important ones, in CI is to use "warnings-as-errors" …

- so one cannot use deprecation flags because it’s also a warning

- when having non trivial ecosystem one cannot selectively deprecate and get errors, this has to be a human process (remember to replace…)

- when doing umbrella tests on non compiled code seed influences order of compilation

- this order of compilation influences outcome and can lead to buggy code

- dependency compilation is not parallelized - takes a lot of time and uses 10% of CPU

- compilation process can break and Elixir isn’t aware that it was interrupted - this means that it doesn’t try to compile properly app/dependency but instead tries to release crippled one

- documentation is hard to use - searching shows random versions and there isn’t even a link to „open newest”

- searching in docs often not finds the keywords you can actually see

- a lot of knowledge is implicit (try checking if you can dynamically add children to a Supervisor)

- sidebar with new ExDocs break for some reason so there is no navigation

- there is no way to browse navigation outside this broken ExDocs which outputs only HTML and LSP

- LSP is afterthought, there are few but neither works well

- Dialyzer/dialyxyr typespecs are useless most of the time

- Squiggly arrow works weird (i.e. ~0.3 might catch 0.99) - my colleague recently mentioned Renovate not picking it up

I could go on and on. I’m doing plenty of research so I’m working with various languages including „niche” ones like Prolog, OCaml, Clojure, Cuelang. Recently I’ve been developing tooling in Go and many core systems are developed in Rust in Elixir, and I work on the latter often.

In principle Elixir is awesome, but has the worst developer experience of all. Sometimes it takes 4h to prepare and push release. Tooling I’m working on can do the same in 5 minutes - I’m parallelizing processes in containers, making idempotent output artifacts and heuristic failure detection to retry on flakiness. When switching between Go and OCaml you can sense how tooling cares for me and my time. Often I bounce off forums where people’s need are shrugged off as non-essential, treating those who came as uneducated juniors (because who in sane mind would like to have a parallel dependencies compilation or disable compilation time warning).

There is nothing better than BEAM, but (for me) Elixir got much worse over the years.

simoncion11• 1 year ago

- a lot of knowledge is implicit (try checking if you can dynamically add children to a Supervisor)

What? This is very clear: <https://www.erlang.org/doc/apps/stdlib/supervisor.html#start...>, as is this: <https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/1.18.3/Supervisor.html#start_child...>. What am I missing?

- this order of compilation influences outcome and can lead to buggy code

Do you have an example of this? It's my understanding that the big thing about both Erlang and Elixir are that they're functional languages, it doesn't matter what's compiled when. Is this some nightmare compile-time code manipulation thing?

...searching [the docs] shows random versions and there isn’t even a link to „open newest”

Is scrolling to the top of the list contained in the version selector near the top left of hexdocs.pm not good enough? If not, why not?

dqv2• 1 year ago

They are probably talking about the child spec needing a unique ID if it's the same module being started.

The docs problem is more of a Google problem. For some reason Google still only shows the 1.12 docs for a lot of searches. The sidebar issue was fixed more recently, I think in the last year. But basically the sidebar wouldn't get loaded until Mermaid finished loading, so it was updated to defer loading of Mermaid. The latest version of ExDoc shouldn't have this problem.

xlii19• 1 year ago

You’re coming from position of knowledge. I don’t memorize documentation because it changes often and I use 3-5 various languages over the month. For fun and profit ;)

So I go into docs, Elixir because that’s the primary source and when I search for „dynamic” and „supervisor” everything points to (no fanfares) DynamicSupervisor. And yet I look at the diff where 12 months earlier my colleague changed DynamicSupervisor to Supervisor because connection adapter tended to crash and not start back up and that day I debug zombie connections.

Erlang has it clearly explained, and ultimately, over couple hours of research I found solution and fixed it, but there was no warning that between two lines of shutdown and delete BEAM could restart a child leading to a shadowing (and - in that case - unmanaged as adapter manager lives in other app that has a slot for a single process only) zombie connection handler.

This is the stuff people rarely look at because many systems don’t have high idempotency requirements but (only a parabole, that’s not my industry) would you like your system to administer double dosage of potentially lethal drugs? None is preferable but it’s still far from happy system land.

As for Hexdocs.pm - this goes once again about operating cost. Yes, I can do this, but search is not great and I more often have a broad queries and search for patterns or guidelines. I rely on „map mode” (how I can find knowledge) and not on „collect mode” (i.e. I keep knowledge), due to some mostly intrinsic traits. And thanks to wonders of modern human tracking^W^Wtechnology I can show anecdotal data of the impact.

When working with Elixir I spent (one random, recent day) 40% of my time on browsing Hexdocs and 60% in editor+console.

One random recent day on Go I spent 95% time in E+C and 5% in documentation.

My first line of code written in Go was less than 6 months ago, my first line of Elixir was written years ago, I would’ve to check my resume when exactly, but somewhere like a 8 years and I toyed with it when it wasn’t yet deemed production ready.

cess11• 1 year ago

"- dependency compilation is not parallelized - takes a lot of time and uses 10% of CPU"

Dependencies are commonly in foreign programming languages, where the compiler might run things concurrently outside of BEAM control. It's not uncommon that Mix is configured by dependencies to just pull a binary for the local architecture from some repo instead. Perhaps that's what you ought to do in your CI and deploy flows, instead of compiling everything.

"- a lot of knowledge is implicit (try checking if you can dynamically add children to a Supervisor)"

What do you mean, "implicit"? It's in the docs:

https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/DynamicSupervisor.html

seer• 1 year ago

About Dializer errors - coming from typescript I’ve had the exact opposite experience.

Now I’m pretty hand with types, especially typescript types, managed to do some pretty complex stuff like using TS types to statically verify complex OpenAPI (swagger) apis on both client and server - basically re-implementing it all for compile time checking.

When I started using Elixer/Dialyzer types I would get into situations where I was like “this stupid error here! It doesn’t understand exactly what I’m trying to do and complains for no reason”. After delving deeper though I found that in 90% of cases it was actually a bug it was that I misunderstood/forgot something.

After that I stated respecting the dialyzer more. Hopefully with the new built in types it would be even better more user friendly.

1oooqooq• 1 year ago

"coming from typescript" in this conversations feels like bait

josevalim4• 1 year ago

Thanks for the feedback! I'd like to comment on some points:

- There seems to be some confusion in relation to warnings. There are two types of warnings, compile-time warnings and runtime warnings. Compile-time warnings are emitted during compilation time and therefore should not affect test runs, aka, when you run code. Runtime warnings can be captured during tests, using `ExUnit.CaptureIO`. Deprecating modules and functions are compile-time warnings

- Indeed you need to enable `--warnings-as-errors` to halt compilation due to warnings in CI. Our philosophy here is to emit compilation warnings instead of compilation errors whenever possible, so you can run, debug, and test your code, instead of forcing your code to be pristine while you are still working on it. The focus here is precisely to provide a better developer experience. Then if you do want them to fail upfront, as in CI, you pass the flag

- "when doing umbrella tests on non compiled code seed influences order of compilation" - I am not sure what this means, sorry. Can you expand? But generally speaking our test framework randomizes test order by default, because you should not depend on order between tests or have dependencies between test files

- "dependency compilation is not parallelized" - when a dependency is compiled, the files in a dependency are parallelized, but not the dependencies themselves, so I'd very surprised if it only used 10% CPU before. In any case, a PR adding this feature was merged this week: https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/pull/14340. In my machine, compiling a project like Livebook uses 350% CPU without the flag above (showing some parallelism), and with the flag above set to 4, it is about 800% (250% + 250% + 150% + 150%). Note my machine has 8 performance cores and I don't get additional gains beyond 4 partitions

- "compilation process can break and Elixir isn’t aware that it was interrupted" - our tooling has code to deal precisely with this: https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/blob/c5c87a661efac6809.... If it still happens, it is a bug and must be reported, so we can fix it

- "try checking if you can dynamically add children to a Supervisor" - the top 4 results for "dynamically add children to a Supervisor in elixir" in Google and Ecosia lead to correct answers in the ElixirForum, StackOverflow, and the documentation. For completeness, I have also asked Claude, which gave a perfect answer (IMO): https://claude.ai/share/9d1e2ad4-2e43-4c32-a293-6fff32dd7001

- "there isn’t even a link to „open newest”" - this has been added to ExDoc, here is one example: https://hexdocs.pm/req/0.5.9/readme.html - but note we have always listed the versions in the sidebar

- "sidebar with new ExDocs break for some reason so there is no navigation" - please give an example, as this would be a bug and should be fixed, and I am not aware of any reports at the moment. Also note docs are available in the terminal, both inside `iex` or by doing `mix help SomeModule`

conradfr• 1 year ago

Great, I hope the new "go to latest" will help Google/DDG/etc link to this instead of a random version of whatever module you look for.

xlii19• 1 year ago

Hey Jose, thanks for your comment. I actually wanted you to notice, because Elixir is still one of the best languages out there (and BEAM is the best), but developer experience IMO is deteriorating over the years.

It's not a problem for people who are completely immersed and can remember most of the guidelines/policies/idiosyncracies. Getting new people on board or even following guildeilnes is hard when work process is interrupted. Some paper cuts are brought on Elixir Forums but I've seen them evaluated as not providing enough benefit to developers or being against design - and I found them through trying to solve very similar problem. I like some changes in devex direction (e.g. recent LSP initiative), yet I think it's lagging to other languages.

I often get cut by various - often small things - but there are so many. Disappointed is amplified by good experience with other (I'll give it to them - more popular or better funded) languages. Yet given very static download count of Jason on Hex I think that rarely new projects are started in Elixir, while Erlang's popularity is slowly but visibly growing, so I don't think I'm alone in my perception.

I will try to respond succintly to followup to not blow up already large text, so let me know if you'd like more info. https://imgur.com/a/iWbTEUf I've uploaded some weirdness I experienced in recent weeks/months.

(ExDocs breaking) ... please give an example In screenshot - happened with Chromium,Safari and Firefox ~6 months ago. Often with OTEL libraries. Today I can't reproduce, but I also have DNS blackholing enabled. Maybe it's fixed or maybe that was analytics breaking on me.
WRT: checking if you can dynamically add children to a Supervisor

Our case was bug caused by change of Dynamic to Normal (we had an app that would be replace in specific context, but otherwise should be supervised as usual). After that we started observing comm channel blocks due to dead connections - it was 77 1/2 bug: Line 77 shut down the child and Line 78 deleted the child, in 77 1/2 Supervisor restarted the child so it couldn't be deleted anymore - and it was able to pick some comm channels. It's not hard to fix, but one has to know that. I don't like "not recommended", as many things aren't recommended but we do it given circumstances. It's better to know the difference and being able to make decision by oneself.

Also note docs are available in the terminal, both inside `iex` or by doing `mix help SomeModule` `mix help Ecto` shows missing task, so I suppose it's a typo (or something I don't have). Help in `iex` (and probably `iex -S mix`) requires dependency download, build, maybe rebuild and some flag and env manipulation (so that app doesn't start entirely) and I hope I started it before breaking compilation because otherwise it won't. Yes, it's there - I agree, but it takes energy to use.
...but note we have always listed the versions in the sidebar

I know, however as text moves places the worst possible example of it is like: Search for A - open - notice wrong version - check which one I should be using in code - change to version B in sidebar - not linked, got bounced to home page - search in ExDocs - nothing found (searchbox often fails to return results, see screenshot) - get back to search engine - type exactly version and query - click there. When it repeats multiple time it starts to become unavoidable busywork.

- "compilation process can break and Elixir isn't aware that it was interrupted" - our tooling has code to deal precisely with this: [https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/blob/c5c87a661efac6809...](https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/blob/c5c87a661efac6809...). If it still happens, it is a bug and must be reported, so we can fix it

I'm 99% sure that it's a result of circular dependencies and maybe one pass fails but then the other starts overwriting or something. But could also be something in compilation pipeline (we have extra steps). I wish there was something like "mix elixir_checks.compile_consistency" (with a flag to send a bug report). Right now feeling a bug means: isolating and justifying it. It takes energy, especially when codebase is complex, big and ridden with prior decisions. I considered doing that, but I think environment is defensive and I'm easy person to pull into fights, but don't enjoy them.

"dependency compilation is not parallelized" I made a mental shortcut - i.e it's using only one core right now, and it's taking approx. 2-3 minutes. Looks like PR would resolve it, but not sure when we'll be able to use it.
when doing umbrella tests on non compiled code seed influences order of compilation In short (I don't know cause) if I run `mix test` from umbrella I'm seeing different compilation order on applications and their dependencies (if I hadn't compiled those before). Those applications aren't guaranteed to be in homogenous dependency state (in fact when I'm looking for dependencies in `mix.exs` I can see popular libraries spread across 3-4 different major versions). Unlucky run happens and consensus is "don't debug `rm -fr _build`).
Our philosophy here is to emit compilation warnings instead of compilation errors whenever possible, so you can run, debug, and test your code, instead of forcing your code to be pristine while you are still working on it.

This is big pain point for me. I care about some warnings, but not for others (e.g. in libraries that ale planned to be dropped ). I also can't enable those I'd like (deprecated - so my colleagues don't use something we want to sunset in root or dreaded circular dependencies). I solved this by complex check chain and custom filters, but in "competition" I get those out of the box.

I won't say that Elixir is worse technology it's just... I know others which are better (but not BEAM, BEAM is THE BEST)

_randyr• 1 year ago

- when having non trivial ecosystem one cannot selectively deprecate and get errors, this has to be a human process (remember to replace…)

Apart from some statically typed languages (and even then), most languages have this. Very rarely in any ecosystem does a dependency upgrade not also require manual changing of stuff.

- when doing umbrella tests on non compiled code seed influences order of compilation - this order of compilation influences outcome and can lead to buggy code

I've never seen compilation produce odd artifacts, especially not as a result of compilation order. If the code has the proper compile-time deps, then the result seems stable.

- documentation is hard to use - searching shows random versions and there isn’t even a link to „open newest”

Isn't this the fault of the search engine not having the latest version indexed? There's also a version selector on the top-left of hexdocs. Navigating to hexdocs.pm/<LIBRARY_NAME> also opens the latest version. This seems like a non-issue to me.

- a lot of knowledge is implicit (try checking if you can dynamically add children to a Supervisor)

Already covered by another commenter, but also: https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/DynamicSupervisor.html I don't think the knowledge is necessarily implicit, it's just that learning Elixir deeply also means learning the BEAM/Erlang deeply, and there's a lot of Erlang docs.

- sidebar with new ExDocs break for some reason so there is no navigation

Not a universal problem. Perhaps look into why it's broken on your device and report it as a bug?

- there is no way to browse navigation outside this broken ExDocs which outputs only HTML and LSP

There's iex. For example `h String.codepoint`. Aside from that, I sometimes just open the relevant library in my deps/ directory and search there.

- Squiggly arrow works weird (i.e. ~0.3 might catch 0.99)

I genuinely don't understand what you mean by this. There's no tilde operator and ~0.3 is invalid syntax. Can you give a code sample?

- dependency compilation is not parallelized

I think this might be related to the common pattern of code you see in libraries:

    if Code.ensure_loaded?(SomeModuleFromAnotherLib) do
       # Some lib is loaded, add code to integrate with it.
    end

I think that could only be solved if that integration were extracted into another lib with properly setup deps, but due to how common this pattern is I don't think it's ever possible to switch to parallel dep compilation.

- Dialyzer/dialyxyr typespecs are useless most of the time

A type system is being worked on, and each release lately has added more checks.

I agree that compilation is slow & editor integration is meh, but the rest I don't agree with.

Munksgaard• 1 year ago

- there is no way to browse navigation outside this broken ExDocs which outputs only HTML and LSP

ExDoc support outputting EPUB as well as HTML.

xlii19• 1 year ago

I never got it working properly, errors on standard libraries, readers breaking etc. Today I mostly ripgrep the code instead - faster and 75% efficent.

vendiddy• 1 year ago

Some of your points are valid (like the LSP) but for our company I've found Elixir has been a great developer experience if you take the good with the bad.

I'm curious what you're working on with Elixir because my experience overall has not been the same.

For example our releases take 10 minutes to cut.

Or when I ask questions on Discord I tend to get answers pretty quickly.

fastball• 1 year ago

What is your company building with Elixir?

xlii19• 1 year ago

I can only say that it’s in the definition of the "critical system". I wouldn’t risk exposing minimal implementation detail to third party (i.e. Discord).

It’s not a specific build but the whole thing, e.g. build takes 10 minutes, but test suite takes 10 minutes as well. Test suite can fail because of a bug or (more often) because of some race condition or build issue.

As I mentioned - today I’m working with Go. It’s nowhere near BEAM but it’s not critical, I never spent more than 15 minutes debugging Go race condition.

And yes, code is at fault, but I’d expect ecosystem to help fixing it, but we have none. E.g. circular dependendencies in umbrella. You can have them. You can print them. There is no warning. They result in inconsistent builds and 40s LSP check loops, during which I have zero access to documentation.

But if I use arrow for map I will get a warning and a compilation error.

sethammons• 1 year ago

Dialyzer/dialyxyr typespecs are useless most of the time

I did Elixir for a year or so. I have to agree. I had to routinely jump up several layers of call sites to understand what I could do with the arguments.

Development where teams share stuff benefits so much from static types. For teams, the best I have experienced is Go.

The BEAM is great and all other systems are just partial and poor implementations of it, as they say. But k8s does a lot. If I could get typing that actually helped me, like in Go, Elixir would jump up my recommendation list

te_chris• 1 year ago

Worth pointing out typing is coming in rapidly, built into the compiler. It’s already doing some checks, and 1.19 is actively adding more. See: https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/main/gradual-set-theoretic-types.h...

johnisgood• 1 year ago

And how does your experience with Elixir compare to Erlang?

xlii19• 1 year ago

I'm biased because I like Prolog and syntax is similar.

I won't advocate strongly, but I think some designs are more clear in Erlang. E.g. nested structs and maps in Elixir are something I consider problem-to-be.

If one writes deeply nested structure in Erlang it looks like syntax vomit, so I'd avoid it. But I haven't been writing in Erlang for a while, so that might be just an illusion.

But it could simplify code while being perfectly compatible, so I wonder (and there's LFE too which feels like something I both want and don't want to touch)

antfarm• 1 year ago

- a lot of knowledge is implicit (try checking if you can dynamically add children to a Supervisor)

https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/DynamicSupervisor.html

xlii19• 1 year ago

I know about Dynamic one, but since I clicked and read (expecting some change) and noticed intro paragraph:

The Supervisor module was designed to handle >>mostly<< static children that are started in the given order when the supervisor starts.

Emphasis mine. But I will spread knowledge that: yes, one can add child to a running Supervisor in runtime and Supervisor will try to use supervision strategy on it (as opposed to DynamicSupervisor that immediately forgets about its child). Replacing a child requires stop-remove in loop (see sibling comment response for exact case).

pawelduda• 1 year ago

Dialyzer/dialyxir are just not worth it 99.9% of time, better wait a few years for a proper static typing support, or use something else if you need it right away

coastalpuma2• 1 year ago

That's funny cause in my experience, Elixir docs are some of the best I've used, and a major strength of the ecosystem which I miss when I'm not writing Elixir. HexDocs has been integrated and standardized from the start, leading to a consistent experience across all packages. The formatting is clear and visually pleasing. All libraries you would want to use have adequate docs. It also includes sections for guides and cheatsheets, avoiding a bifurcation between those an API docs. In general, it's really easy to find the function being called because Elixir mostly avoids duck typing, and you can just directly look up the module in question. All in all, I seriously miss the docs when programming for example in Ruby (slow, ugly, rdocs which many projects don't adopt or adopt half-heartedly), or especially Javascript. In the latter case, the trend of making flashy marketing sites instead of using a standardized tool is a serious pain. I really wish the community would settle on a high quality standard. Deno's JSR docs looks kind of promising in how it's positioned, but I don't think the formatting and usability is that great so far.

simoncion11• 1 year ago

I agree about the content of Elixir's docs. They seem to have inherited the habit of documenting things well, which is a fuckin great habit to have.

But. Honestly, I hate the hell out of how Elixir's docs look, and am pretty unhappy with how Erlang's docs started aping the style.

Seriously, check out the EBNF-esque description of the types for this function: <https://web.archive.org/web/20170509122932/http://erlang.org...>. Notice also how some of the documentation for all of the 'request' variants fits on a single screen. Scroll to the top of the page and notice the regular formatting and prominent, clear section headings. See how the significant data types used by the module are described in one place. Scroll to the bottom and observe the "See also" section. Notice the very clear navigation on the left-hand side that gives you obvious springboards to any part of the documentation.

Compare that to this: <https://www.erlang.org/doc/apps/inets/httpc.html#request/1>. Notice how you get a function or three of typespec on a screen. There's so much scrolling to get to the function's behavioral description. And the EBNF has been replaced with raw typespecs! If you understand how to read Erlang typespecs, it's totally possible to read the function type. But, like, if you're starting out with the language, this is WAY harder to read. Not to mention the loss of the clear headings at the top of the document and the centralized list of data types, as well as the "phone style" navigation widget on the left that obscures at least as much as it reveals.

notpublic• 1 year ago

My experience has been just the opposite. We have moved all our apps to Elixir now. It has one of the best developer experience to work with. Especially for concurrent programming.

I suspect OP is using an umbrella app as a shared library or something. That is the only explanation I can think of that can cause the issue with compilation order.

About documentation, not quite sure what the OP is talking about. Elixir and Erlang have really good documentation.

Anyway, to truly appreciate Elixir (and for that matter Erlang), one needs to understand OTP and the philosophy behind it. It is not just a language but a framework to build concurrent application.

sschueller• 1 year ago

Someone tracked every single camera shot during the halftime show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXNWfFtgbNI

jcalx• 1 year ago

You can also see what it looks like from the control room on Hamish Hamilton's YouTube channel, with the AD calling out shots and all: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gfjWjkTP4p8. (Hamish Hamilton has directed every Super Bowl halftime show since 2010.)

oplav• 1 year ago

John DeMarsico directs the SNY broadcasts for the NY Mets and sometimes posts behind the scenes for how all the cameras come together into a production. I think they are pretty interesting to watch.

https://x.com/SNYtv/status/1832250958258036871

innocentoldguy2• 1 year ago

I have implemented Elixir in critical financial applications, B2B growth intelligence applications, fraud detection applications, scan-and-go shopping applications, and several others.

In every case, like the engineering team in this article demonstrates, the developer experience and end results have exceeded expectations. If you haven’t used Elixir, you should give it a try.

Edit: Fixed an editing error.

roughly• 1 year ago

Elixir and Erlang have always garnered a lot of respect and praise - I’m always curious why they’re not more widely used (I’m no exception - despite hearing great things for literal decades, I’ve never actually picked it up to try for a project).

AlchemistCamp3• 1 year ago

I think most people tend to stick with what they learn first or hop to very similar languages. Schools generally taught Java and then more recently Python and JS, all of which are relatively similar.

Unless someone who knows those three languages is curious or encounters a particular problem that motivates them to explore, they're unlikely to pick up an immutable, functional language.

solid_fuel• 1 year ago

I've thought about this a lot, and I think that part of what hurts Erlang/Elixir adoption is the scale of the OTP. It brings a ton of fantastic tools, like supervision trees, process linking, ETS, application environments & config management, releases, and more. In some ways it's closer to adopting a new OS than a new programming language.

That's what I love about Elixir, but it means that selling it is more like convincing a developer who knows and uses CSV to switch to Postgres. There's a ton of advantages to storing data in a relational DB instead of flat files, but now you have to define a schema up front, deal with table and row locking, figure out that VACUUM thing, etc.

When you're just setting out to learn a new language, trying to understand a new OS on top hurts adoption.

joehosteny4• 1 year ago

We use it in our robotics startup, and I wholeheartedly agree.

As an example, we just rolled out a feature in our cloud offering that allows a user to remotely call a robot to a specified waypoint inside a facility, and show real time updates of the robot's position on its map of the world as it navigates there. We did this with just MQTT, LiveView, Phoenix PubSub, and a very small amount of JS for map controls. The cloud portion of this feature was basically built in 2-3 weeks by one person (minus some pre-existing code for handle displaying raw map PNGs from S3, existing MQTT ingress handling, etc.).

Of course you _can_ do things like this with other languages. However, the core language features are just so good that, for our use cases, it blows the other choices out of the water.

_rs• 1 year ago

Would you be open to dropping an email address? I'd love to chat about your experience with Elixir for financial applications if you have any time

DerekL• 1 year ago

The title is misspelled, should be “Super Bowl”, two words.

frankfrank13• 1 year ago

Really cool piece, this jumped out to me:

The devices in a given location communicate and coordinate on the network over a custom MQTT protocol. Over a hundred cameras without issue on a single Remote Control Panel (RCP), implemented on top of Elixir’s network stack.

Makes sense! MQTT is, if I understand right, built on TCP. Idk if I would have found the same solution, but its seemingly a good one

eggy3• 1 year ago

Would Gleam be practical for a similar application aside from the OTP/BEAM runtime? I am guessing you'd have to leverage Elixir libraries that are not present for Gleam yet, and you might have slower compile times due to static typing, but you'd catch runtime errors sooner. Would it be more of a debugging vs. fast dynamic iteration trade-off? I am looking to settle on either Gleam or Elixir. I liked Gleam's original ML syntax before, but I like static typing. Thoughts? I am replacing C with Zig, and I am brushing up on my assembly by adding ARM to my x64 skill set.

widdershins3• 1 year ago

Gleam has a subset of OTP functionality already [1]. It also compiles extremely quickly. I haven't made any huge projects yet, but I've used some fairly chunky libraries and everything compiles super quick.

[1] https://github.com/gleam-lang/otp

nesarkvechnep• 1 year ago

It’s subpar at the moment.

AlchemistCamp3• 1 year ago

you'd catch runtime errors sooner

I don’t think there’s any evidence whatsoever that you would catch runtime bugs sooner with Gleam than with Elixir (or Erlang). Erlang’s record for reliability is stronger than many statically typed languages, including even Java.

There is a certain class of errors static types can prevent but there’s a much larger set of those it can’t. To make the case for a language like TS/Java/Swift/Golang or Gleam actually resulting in fewer runtime defects than Erlang or Elixir, I’d want to see some real world data.

eggy3• 1 year ago

It depends on what “sooner” means to you. Gleam catches more before the code runs; Elixir catches them when they happen but recovers gracefully. If you’re paranoid about bugs reaching users, I would think Gleam’s your pick, no? If you trust your tests and love dynamic freedom, Elixir should be fine. I don't have much experience with either language. I did more in Erlang 8 years ago, but not much. I am on the edge of choosing Gleam over Elixir. It's mainly subjective: I prefer the syntax in Gleam, although I liked the original ML-like syntax when it first came out.

__jonas• 1 year ago

There is a certain class of errors static types can prevent but there’s a much larger set of those it can’t

Maybe you can go into this more, but I don't really understand what that means, what is this larger set of runtime errors that can't be prevented by static typing?

I use a bit of Elixir, and I'd say most of the errors I'm facing at runtime are things like "(FunctionClauseError) no function clause matching", which is not only avoidable in Gleam, but actually impossible to write without dipping into FFI.

I'm excited for more static typing to come into Elixir, as it stands I'm only really confident about my Elixir code when it has good test coverage, and even then I feel uneasy when refactoring. Still a fun language to use though.

ghislainle4• 1 year ago

One criticism I have with elixir is the lack of typing (they are working on it now, but I have yet to use it). So yes, I think gleam would be nice. But when we started, it was not even version 0.1 (and I had not heard of it)

I suppose we can have a mixed language project, with erlang, elixir and gleam. Not sure about the practicality of it though

eggy3• 1 year ago

Amazing work, and certainly for such a tentacled project good enough is good enough. I only brought up Gleam vs. Elixir because I am going to pick one to learn this year. I've played with LFE too, and as I wrote earlier, I played with Erlang for a bit.

markb139• 1 year ago

30 odd years ago, part of my role was to colour balance cameras in a studio environment. We didn’t need computers - but at most there were only 5 cameras :)

brcmthrowaway• 1 year ago

Wait, is Elixir actually accessing color pixel data in realtime?

davidbou10• 1 year ago

No, it deals with metadata: control and status as explained in a previous reply https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43479094#43482362

Elixir does some computations as well but when we had to compute 3D luts based on video processing algorithms, Ghislain had to write them in C to be fast enough for our needs on embedded hardware.

Coordinating the Superbowl's visual fidelity with Elixir

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