Elixir-lang.org has a new design

https://elixir-lang.org/

by bbg2401 • 4 days ago

253 127 4 days ago

elixir-lang.org

bbg24012• 4 days ago

Also observed here: https://elixirforum.com/t/elixir-lang-org-redesign/76041

allanmacgregor• 4 days ago

Looks pretty good, I like that they are highlighting the potential uses for elixir.

grahac• 4 days ago

This is great! Now waiting for the forum UI update too! :)

Hoping Elixir continues to thrive. It is such a great language (and such a great language for AI coding too!)

Stromgren• 4 days ago

In fact it came out as the absolute best in a comparison by Tencent (1). See table 4. It’s more than a year old though.

1. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.09101

alberth2• 4 days ago

Elixir is great.

OT: I wish more funding & development effort went into BEAM itself on making it more performant.

Note: I’m not talking concurrency. I’m talking pure raw performance.

Seems like it’s been a one person show for over a decade on making it faster.

ch4s35• 4 days ago

It’s pretty hard to make things like math faster for real world use cases in a bytecode interpreter.

dmpk2k• 4 days ago

It's a JIT nowadays. Admittedly an extremely simple one, to minimize compile times and maintenance overhead.

You can get substantial performance improvements by using guards though. See what Wings3D does with is_float() everywhere in hot numeric-heavy code.

jimbokun• 4 days ago

Java and Javascript run times do really well at that.

dnautics8• 4 days ago

i ran a quick experiment where instead of doing boxing the way its done in the beam currently, i used a different boxing (NaN strategy and there was a 10x speedup

josevalim6• 4 days ago

There are multiple people working on the JIT within the last 5-6 years. The WhatsApp folks also contribute meaningfully.

I suspect once the Erlang/OTP team squeezes all performance in the JIT, they will look into optimizing across modules, which will probably open up many new possibilities, but it requires rethinking some runtime primitives.

alberth2• 4 days ago

Hi Jose

You’re an inspiration for many. Thank you.

I’m curious to know what your top 3 hopes for BEAM itself are for the coming years (in any area that you think would make it better).

ashton314• 4 days ago

A few years ago, I was working on an interpreter implemented in elixir for a domain specific language. It was a pretty basic metacircular interpreter. It relied heavily on function signature dispatch. When I tried breaking up the massive “interpret” function across modules, performance tanked. I got it all back by using some macro shenanigans, but understandably the team did not like this.

Knowing what I know now, I would’ve tried to push for a threaded interpreter to get rid of the runtime overhead of dispatching altogether. I don’t know if they’ve changed the architecture of that module much since I left :-)

jeanlucas• 4 days ago

Nice! The showcase of companies is really nice

losvedir• 4 days ago

To me, it seems one of the killer use cases for Elixir (/Erlang) is its distributed cluster capability. Does anyone have experience with that or case reports to share? I've used Elixir quite a bit professionally, but mostly as just a "nicer Rails" with horizontally scalable but otherwise independent Phoenix apps in your traditional Kubernetes setup, which seems to me to kind of missing out on its main purpose.

davidw• 4 days ago

Elixir/Erlang works very well in a semi-embedded environment where you need a higher level command and control component that behaves in a deterministic way and is pretty robust.

I was involved, years ago, in using Erlang on these devices: https://www.icare-world.com/us/product/icare-eidon/

It was a lot of fun and there were some very interesting challenges for everyone involved.

org3• 4 days ago

I've worked a little bit with distributed Elixir using `Horde.DynamicSupervisor` on Kubernetes. Apparently there's other options like 'swarm' and DynamicSupervisor [1]. It'd be great for clear analysis of the benefits these kinds of abstractions bring vs non-BEAM approaches.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZmDEUeHeVI

jomcgi• 4 days ago

Also interested in hearing about this! I built an elixir k8s control plane recently and kept expecting to reach for it but it never really made sense when it was controlling golang daemonsets.

My usecase is less independent though, that control plane is orchestrating like Lambda/fly.io style workloads on top of firecracker: https://jomcgi.dev/ember

toast03• 4 days ago

It's been a while, but I used to work at WhatsApp and we used Erlang distribution heavily. I understand the clusters have gotten really huge since I left.

It's super handy. There's no security barrier between nodes. It's a headache if your network is unreliable.

For a chat app, messaging someone becomes a series of steps:

a) look up if they're online (send a message to the presence database service)

b) if you got a process id back, that's the process connected to the user, so send it the message. The process could be on the same machine or not, but the sending api is the same. This is the special part: few other environments make arbitrary messaging between processes/threads/tasks/whathaveyou so pervasive.

c) if you don't get a process id back, the user is offline; send the message to the offline database.

arikrahman2• 4 days ago

I prefer https://jank-lang.org/ new re-design, and the approach of a more step-wise refinement.

__float• 4 days ago

How is this language related to Elixir? Or are you just commenting that another language has a website?

arikrahman2• 4 days ago

They had a recent re-design last week.

Starlevel004• 4 days ago

Why does it have like 0.1s animations?

josevalim6• 4 days ago

Can you clarify which ones? We will be glad to improve them (or feel free to send a PR).

binaryturtle• 4 days ago

Site doesn't work for me (older Firefox). Looks like there's no CSS and some Javascript error (probably makes it bail out loading the CSS?)

pwg• 4 days ago

It also does not load if Javascript is blocked.

sph2• 4 days ago

No mention of AI and LLM in the front page. Life is good.

Onavo• 4 days ago

But I bet the landing page was made with AI assistance.

reliablereason• 4 days ago

It certainly looks like a Claude design to some extent; not all they way however.

bbg24012• 4 days ago

It feels less sloppy than most obviously AI generated landing pages.

The only sloppy aspects that stand out to me are the needless animations/transitions.

sph2• 4 days ago

It was not: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48959936

eikenberry• 4 days ago

They have a Machine Learning section on the front page. Just have to scroll down a bit, under the "Use Elixir for" section.

nozzlegear2• 4 days ago

I don't think Machine Learning falls under what most people consider "AI" and "LLM" these days, even if they're technically intertwined.

phoghed• 4 days ago

Thankfully you were here to make sure we didn’t forget about it for even one post

listic2• 4 days ago

I guess it is still legal?

asa4002• 4 days ago

Looks great! There are some style quirks with cutoff elements in Firefox 152.0.6: https://imgur.com/a/OtnESi7

phplovesong5• 4 days ago

I guess elixir is a nice lang for the niche of erlang. But its dynamic (the "type system" is really meh at best) its not suited for real world use.

If i go full dynamic, why not use pure erlang instead?

ch4s35• 4 days ago

Have you tried it since the new type system rolled out?

phplovesong5• 4 days ago

Yes. It feel unergonomic and bolted on. I rather have a pure static type system, or a full dynamic language.

pluralmonad2• 4 days ago

Maybe try and build something and see for yourself? Saying elixir is not fit for real world use shows how little experience with it you have.

phplovesong5• 4 days ago

I tried it, and it brings little. It got new syntax, but syntax alone is not important. I can build with erlang, so why would i pick elixir? I used erlang for almost 20 years, and never saw the idea of elixir.

Gleam on the other hand has a actual type system. It still young but i can see what it offers.

So syntax for me is totally pointless and just noise.

dnautics8• 4 days ago

not suited for real world use.

I hope you don't use discord or rely on pagerduty.

phplovesong5• 4 days ago

Dont use discord, never have. It could be just as easily be built in vanilla. Its just a chat really. Nothing special.

inigyou• 3 days ago

discord is also unsuitable for real world use

loloquwowndueo3• 4 days ago

There’s no obvious way to switch to normal (aka “light”) mode. Dark mode is very difficult for some people (me included) to read.

If you must default to dark mode that’s your choice but I’d love to see a light mode toggle somewhere prominent.

madibo3156• 4 days ago

Yeah. You'll notice that there's a mix of light and dark. Some segments are light-on-dark, then it switches to dark-on-light. It appears to me like a "design trend" that's at odds with accessibility. https://www.apple.com does this too.

moomoo11• 4 days ago

i along with 99% of people don’t mind it

sheept3• 4 days ago

Why would it be at odds with accessibility? The text contrast is excellent in each section, and the light/dark segments clearly define the border between sections. Forced dark mode can be difficult to read for users with astigmatism, but the font size is large, and the actual documentation sites[0] do have a light/dark switch.

[0] https://elixir.hexdocs.pm/1.20.2/

eddd-ddde• 4 days ago

Ideally websites just respect the existing media queries so you don't even have to switch!

sheept3• 4 days ago

Designs can't be easily split into a pure light or dark mode, though. Before light/dark modes were popularized, it was common to have some parts be "dark" and other parts be "light," depending on the design (for example, would the iOS 5 game center be "dark mode"?). Elixir's website uses a mix of light and dark to delineate sections.

One consequence of software recently supporting light and dark schemes is that UI designs end up committing to all white or all dark, rather than tastefully choosing a color scheme that best frames its content in context.

zuzululu6• 4 days ago

I appreciate Elixir but the problem is the job market/talent pool is tiny compared to other existing languages.

If you buy into the Elixir stack then you now have constraint you could've avoided entirely by avoiding it.

Also for devs there seems to be no premium offered for this talent pool scarcity. With LLMs I think language-specialists are redundant in a large scheme of things. ex) at one of my current remote jobs, I shipped an entire telecom infrastructure with barely knowing Elixir and we brought on contractors to audit the code and they found no issues.

toast03• 4 days ago

appreciate Elixir but the problem is the job market/talent pool is tiny compared to other existing languages.
I shipped an entire telecom infrastructure with barely knowing Elixir and we brought on contractors to audit the code and they found no issues.

Erlang/Elixir experience is rare, because it's not widely used and the teams are small. It's not worth trying to hire for it. Hire for people who can figure it out on the go (amd are willing to give it a try).

You did it, hire other people who seem likely to be able to.

zuzululu6• 4 days ago

as a SWE this is not a good sign. it means the job market is slowly transitioning into temp work like economics. The value I got out of the Elixir contractors was immense since it not only proved that we can get a huge bulk of the work done without specialists and use them on demand for audit for a few months before AI this would've been not been possible.

normal market dynamics suggest scarcity demand premiums but this is not the case with software developers it seems.

dnautics8• 4 days ago

i hired a biologist (for my pharma startup) and she produced feature ideas for our internal stack and was guiding claude to write idiomatic code with feedback from my reviews with no coding experience. realistically if you want to start an elixir company today you need one consciencious senior that likes code review and any number of juniors with minimal competency and sufficient curiosity.

stanmancan4• 4 days ago

If you vibe coded an entire telecom infrastructure and an external audit found no issues then it sounds like you might need to find better auditors.

zuzululu6• 4 days ago

both contracts have over 10 years of experience with Elixir and one of them have written a widely used library. I think you are tad out of touch with the job market and with where agentic coding is right now.

9999000009992• 4 days ago

Elixir is such an elegant language.

I'm hoping to find a reason to use it soon.

pluralmonad2• 4 days ago

Such a delight to use and the core team seems to always make the right decision.

dnautics8• 4 days ago

its been fun building a multiagent personal assistant.

(wip, no guarantees, this is the engine i use)

https://github.com/ityonemo/ce_ce

andruby• 4 days ago

Reading the Erlang ProgProgrammers book by Joe Armstrong made me a better Ruby programmer as it changed my perspective on functional programming and abstractions.

I first reached for Elixir when Ruby couldn't handle large amounts of websocket messages. It really shines in high-concurrency contexts. I also love Phoenix LiveView and have a couple of side-projects running on it.

shevy-java2• 4 days ago

I think most will agree that it improved on Erlang.

For me as a long-term ruby user, though, elixir is not quite as elegant as it could or should have been. Even simple things such as "defmodule Xyz do" feels weird to me.

CyberDildonics• 4 days ago

I'm hoping to find a reason to use it soon.

Do you have a program that doesn't need to run fast?

ipnon• 4 days ago

It's a good joke but most of my applications are I/O bound. So I use Elixir for performance.

9999000009992• 4 days ago

I actually experimented with using it as a backend for a multiplayer turn based game.

I eventually gave up because it’s a bit too difficult without a team.

jimbob45• 4 days ago

Why not use Java, C#, or Swift in that case?

hybridcivic182• 4 days ago

José Valim & team have made such an incredible language and ecosystem. thank you for all the faithful work, especially the run up to 1.20 over this past year

listic2• 4 days ago

I heard from a fan of Erlang that Elixir was made by people who don't really understand Erlang who reworked it/BEAM to be in the style of Ruby; that made it popular even though it's an abomination. What do you think?

atonse• 4 days ago

A “fan” of erlang definitely gives me vibes if the 3-4 people at conferences who used to debate about Erlang and Haskell and all these things in very academic ways and enjoyed it.

And that’s awesome. We need people like that. But the vast majority of people want to get stuff done, and I have always admired that Jose Valim seems to be one of those people that just “gets” the mix of good technology with its PRACTICAL use rather than just debating programming languages endlessly.

Without elixir, outside of a handful of companies implementing it in their core systems, erlang probably would’ve mostly remained in the domain of the same guys at conferences that passionately debated tabs vs spaces or BDD vs TDD. In fact, I think that’s exactly where Haskell is. I barely hear about it, just like I used to barely hear about erlang.

The rest of us that focus on what we’re building with the technology or the dev UX, etc, would’ve stuck to ruby and other things, if not for elixir.

I say this as someone who has been writing elixir full time since early 2016 and absolutely love the beam. And I’ve yet to edit my first erlang file. It just hasn’t mattered in most of my real world use.

vendiddy• 4 days ago

I don't think this is true.

The history of Elixir has its roots in Jose learning Erlang, loving the properties BEAM, but wanting a different language.

All of the principles of the BEAM still exist in Elixir. And a lot of the Elixir semantics come from Erlang, precisely because Jose studied Erlang and the BEAM.

xanthor• 4 days ago

Absurd statement. If you omit surface-level syntax, there's very little that's "in the style of Ruby" in terms of actual semantics.

asa4002• 4 days ago

It's nonsense. The people who made Elixir understand Erlang and the BEAM as well as anyone on earth. Elixir and Erlang have different syntax but aren't even that semantically different. Contrast this with say, Java and Clojure. Clojure is significantly different than Java both in terms of what idiomatic code is, as well as how the average developer understands and uses their tools day-to-day. (Obviously they both run on the same VM, the JVM, which is why this comparison works.)

Elixir has some semantic "userspace"-level differences from Erlang (Elixir has protocols, macros, defaults to strings as binaries rather than strings as charlists, among other things) but they are much more similar than they are different. Both are on BEAM, both expression-based languages, both use processes for concurrency, have immutable data, use pattern matching for control flow, rely heavily on OTP, deploy with releases, share (or build on) the same datastructures, have the same performance characteristics, etc. If you know Elixir you pretty much already know Erlang modulo the time it takes to learn Erlang's syntax.

radialstub• 4 days ago

Joe Armstrong, one of the creators of erlang: "Dave loves Elixir, I think it's pretty cool, I think we're going to have fun together."

bmitc• 4 days ago

Elixir, the language, is still basically Erlang with some niceties. The main Ruby influences are the syntax, which I don't love but can't say I hate, macros, which Erlang doesn't have, and large web-frameworks like Phoenix.

Elixir is a wonderful language and one of my favorite languages.

Elixir was made by people who don't really understand Erlang

And this is definitely not true.

cultofmetatron• 4 days ago

elixir also has hygenic macros ala scheme. it also easier to write and read day to day compared to erlang. elixir also made strings more manageable.

they made a bunch of tangible improvements

ZephyrP• 4 days ago

Although I'm late to the pile-on and all the good takes have grown old and gotten replies, I cannot let this grave insult against my people go unanswered.

Elixir, if anything, really excels at communicating the intentions of the (occasionally esoteric) architectural demands that the Erlang originally fortified decades ago, often encountered when using OTP. This, alongside that tower of respected Elixir tooling, adhering to Erlang's norms which, once past "mere" interoperability within BEAM, is still supremely important when e.x. minimizing laborious/unusual syntax requirements when using Elixir modules from 'naive' Erlang code. This is part of a more wide-reaching feeling, one of common concerns being important to address in Elixir (and Erlang) for the health of the franchise, not just as grist for the mill of an ancient FP hyperwar, each warring cybergang being willing to die for their preferred juridical interpretation of a bug report.

swingboy• 4 days ago

On the first syntax example: there’s something funny to me about using three pipe operator and four different functions to turn “hello world” into “Hello World”.

josevalim6• 4 days ago

That's a good point. It is meant to be an introductory example but I will see if I can come up with something else! Thanks!

EDIT: shipped!

tosti• 4 days ago

I followed the links to docs and getting started, but it says page not found.

The URL: https://elixir.hexdocs.pm/getting-started.html

josevalim6• 4 days ago

It should be fixed soon (deploying now). Thank you!!!

jolux• 4 days ago

Love the new site!

Minor typo in the Erlang card:

“Elixir also excels at IoT, distributed systems, and everything the Erlang is renowned for”

should probably be “everything the Erlang VM is known for” or “everything Erlang is known for.”

josevalim6• 4 days ago

Boom! Fixed, thanks!

aejm• 4 days ago

I think this version is an improvement over the old one! In particular how it highlights the packages in the ecosystem better.

shevy-java2• 4 days ago

Looks nice. But it would be more important to clean up elixir itself. So many things are unnecessary syntax-wise. At the least elixir made working with erlang easier, so they solved that part.

stanmancan4• 4 days ago

Such as?

SoftTalker• 4 days ago

I don't really have large monitors by today's standards, and the site looks nice enough but fully half of what I'm looking at is blank space. I don't remember what the old site looked like so don't know if that's really a change.

khurs• 4 days ago

Didn't see the old one, so don't know whats changed.

But it's blazing fast which is good to see.

mattmatters• 4 days ago

Thanks crew, looks great.

Love how dedicated you all are to providing clear entrypoints and being thoughtful around documentation!

AloysB• 4 days ago

Nice re-design.

I didn't mind the old one, but I understand that it helps adoption to keep the website shinier.

asp_hornet• 4 days ago

I picked up Elixir this year. I’m gobsmacked on what the language and BEAM offer. Such a slept on ecosystem. I’m full convert.

New site looks great.

giancarlostoro• 4 days ago

One of my favorite devs I love listening to talks from is Joe Armstrong and he had a blog post where he wrote a post about Elixir, and it was mostly positive, I feel like if he wasnt building Erlang he would have just became an Elixir developer.

https://joearms.github.io/published/2013-05-31-a-week-with-e...

RIP Joe Armstrong you were brilliant.

Joel_Mckay• 4 days ago

Erlang ran multi-billion dollar market cap telecom companies for decades. Elixir just made Erlang easier to learn, and yes they replace a lot of cluster bodges at scale.

Does rapid cross-platform deployments with single code-base ease, and with Phoenix channels is very economical =3

https://quasar.dev/introduction-to-quasar/

syspec• 4 days ago

I waited for an great editing expert before trying elixir, that never came...

But, now with LLMs I don't have to fear a loosely typed language, I'd love to give it another go.

nine_k2• 4 days ago

You can try Gleam instead (also on the front page today).

aeonfox• 4 days ago

loosely typed

Minor nitpick: I believe Elixir and Erlang are strongly typed languages, but for a long time they have both been dynamically typed. With v1.20, Elixir is well on its way to transitioning to a gradually static typed language, and to-date has done so almost purely through inference (except for guards which can explicitly specify type information)

SilentM68• 4 days ago

Really cool site redesign and great language :)

The only thing I believe the language's missing is it's own dedicated IDE.

josefrichter• 4 days ago

BEAM, the Elixir runtime, happens to be the perfect choice for agents and orchestration of multi-agent systems. I’ve written about it e.g. here https://josefrichter.design/blog/crowd

Elixir-lang.org has a new design

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