Membrane: Media Framework for Elixir

by lawik • 1 year ago

165 42 1 year ago

This is such a cool project. Haven't used it for any serious things but just the ability to have a high performance media streaming framework inside of Elixir is amazing. You literally could build Twitch just using BEAM and nothing else (a Postgres database is probably good to have though).

clacker-o-matic• 1 year ago

That would be the dream. Do you know of any major apps using elixir besides telecom?

_mlbt3• 1 year ago

There are several companies that are known to use elixir in production...

https://elixir-lang.org/cases.html

cultofmetatron2• 1 year ago

my startup is using elixir in production for the last 5 years. we are a cloud based restaurant POS.

no regrets. the ecosystem has been pretty solid for everything we've wanted to do. Stability/performance has been very good.

also: if you're looking for a high profile startup using elixir, supabase is almost entirely elixir and discord uses it for some critical parts.

atonse2• 1 year ago

We’ve been running elixir in production since 2017.

During the pandemic, our elixir app sent/received 45 million text messages, helped schedule 1.5 million vaccination appointments, and a few million COVID testing appointments.

It all scaled and performed flawlessly. Any bugs were our fault :-)

fridder• 1 year ago

Cars.com did a pretty extensive rewrite to Elixir

vishalontheline• 1 year ago

OkNext.io is built using Elixir and Phoenix framework, if you're considering building a Web App and looking for examples.

paradox4602• 1 year ago

PagerDuty, Pinterest, TheRealReal, Discord, Cars.com, Bleacher report

ettomatic• 1 year ago

At the BBC we use Elixir quite extensively. I'll talk about this at ElixirConfEU in a few days if you are interested.

victorbjorklund3• 1 year ago

Cars.com, Discord, Supabase are some of the top of my head. And of course Whatsapp is Erlang (which is same thing but with, imo, more ugly syntax)

_mlbt3• 1 year ago

The BEAM even includes a database - Mnesia...

https://www.erlang.org/doc/apps/mnesia/mnesia.html

throwawaymaths4• 1 year ago

Honestly I think mnesia is one of those "don't use it unless you know what you're doing" things. Just use postgres.

jerf2• 1 year ago

Mnesia is not a database by any modern definition of the term and it should generally be avoided. It is at least 4 if not 5 orders of magnitude away from "being able to run Twitch". That is, yes, I'm serious, if you tried to run a Twitch clone "but 10,000x smaller" I would still expect Mnesia to completely fall over.

schultzer2• 1 year ago

mnesia is great, and you can get very far before you would make the jump to anything else. And it can be way faster then any other database. For obvious reasons.

Although it would be great if it spoke SQL, maybe one day it will: https://github.com/elixir-dbvisor/sql since we can already pass it and get the AST.

Sean-Der• 1 year ago

Fantastic project, and the team behind it is really good! The developers I have worked with are passionate about building things the right way (not just making it work/adding kludge).

I felt like I was seeing the future when I saw the visualization/rendering of PeerConnection stats on the server side. The video compositor is really neat also how they have it working with live modifications.

I wish I had more time/a chance to use it on a project myself.

mml• 1 year ago

I really wish Nvidia had gone in this direction instead of gstreamer :/

AlphaWeaver• 1 year ago

I looked at using this for a client project a few months ago. We use Erlang and Elixir at work, and it's my go-to for anything serious.

Be aware that parts of their stack use a custom license for some components... but a large portion of it is OSS Apache 2.0, which is nice if you can stick to those parts!

kingofheroes• 1 year ago

I recall doing a tutorial for Exilir, the Phoenix framework in particular, a few years back and I actually enjoyed using it. Anyone know any good up-to-date tutorials someone could use?

malkosta• 1 year ago

The official ones are still the best: https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix/overview.html and https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/introduction.html

tortilla• 1 year ago

For Phoenix/LiveView, the pragmaticstudio's courses are great. I just completed https://pragmaticstudio.com/courses/phoenix

abrookewood• 1 year ago

Second the Pragmatic Studio courses. If you want something free, this is a good channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rpt5sMb7cw

nw05678• 1 year ago

During my foray into Elixir I never found the develop environment as smooth as other languages.

bo0tzz• 1 year ago

A bunch of work is currently going into improving that.

innocentoldguy• 1 year ago

What do you mean by "develop environment"? Are you referring to IDE support or features like mix, IEx, pry, releases, etc.?

If the latter, Elixir has one of the best development environments, in my opinion. Mix is fantastic, releases are easy, and Elixir's error messages in IEx are the clearest I've seen in my 30+ year career.

I use Emacs to write code, and beyond syntax coloring, I don't want anything else, so you may have a point if you're talking about IDE support.

atonse2• 1 year ago

as others have said, there’s a lot of work going into improving the dev experience.

There were 3 LSP implementations. they’re getting combined, so IDE support should improve.

There’s technically a step through debugger, but it’s extremely slow if you actually get it working.

There is a new type system too.

neya• 1 year ago

This is really cool! Not just that, we actually really needed something like this in Elixir for a lot of projects and always had to end up going with some NodeJS implementation. Thank you <3

Membrane: Media Framework for Elixir

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