I have started fiddling with rust, and one thing that I miss from the Elixir world is binary pattern parsing/matching. The elixir model is so much nicer, I've used byteorder to convert a datetime to a byte array and then the reverse and it is not the most elegant code, nom looks much nicer. I wish rust had Elixir/Erlang like binary pattern matching.
I've been using Elixir/Erlang for more than 6 years and absolutely love it. The community is a lovely place to be, tooling is great. Concurrency is awesome. Erlang is battle tested. If you are building applications that have anything to do with networks, you'll be able to build some seriously performant apps without having to reach for other tools and I love the community's focus on performance.
> We also found many times missing libraries, or found libraries which are incomplete, or unmaintained or just not well documented
Can you give some examples here. This may have been true in the past, but isn't true anymore. I can give an example where ruby is lacking: Performant HTTP libraries, Elixir and Erlang are so good in this space, look at `finch`, `httpoison` etc,. there is first class support for HTTP2 and connection pooling / persistent connections which is very hard to find in ruby.
> Tooling is just terrible. The VSCode plugin is crap, kills the CPU unless you disable features. There is no IDE from jetbrains. There is a plugin but last time I tried it, it was even worse than the VSCode plugin.
Which plugin are you referring to? Is it using dialyzer? Using dialyzer gives you so much static analysis for free as opposed to the default ruby vscode plugin. I have never heard of complaints about tooling. On the other hand, I know lots of developers who love the tooling, mix is great, iex gives you documentation with just `h String`. Plus with language server support, you have really good IDE support in vscode and vim. Look at the number of stars on the `ElixirLS` plugin here: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/search?term=elixir&targ...
> Also, I've read some comments where people mention "we don't need redis", "we don't need workers" everything is so much easier. That was our thinking at first. But then you realize on deployments you will lose your cache, or your background jobs, etc.
Yes, you'll lose data in your cache. Caches are supposed to be ephemeral, not everyone needs their caches to be persisted. However, if your use case requires persistence, you have a lot more options than just sticking it in redis. Plus, `oban` is a high quality background processor with persistence, without the need for adding redis to your stack.
For applications where performance matters, Elixir and Erlang give you lots of tools to build a truly performant app, However, if you don't need those tools, you might be better off building it in something more familiar.
I used to program professionally in Elixir where we talked to a ton of external providers. So, our app was heavy on the network (http) and Elixir was a really good fit for it. Now, I use it on personal projects.
The Elixir ecosystem is really healthy. You can find almost any package you want on hex (https://hex.pm/). Moreover, because it is built on top of erlang you can seamlessly use any Erlang code (which a lot of Elixir apps use).
You can usually find high-quality libraries with a google search or looking at the number of stars of a hex package. Mix, the build tool is awesome and the language now has out of the box support for creating deployment releases.
Love the game! It would be nice to wrap this up in an Android app and put it on the market place just because when I build games like these my kids end up closing the browser somehow :) I built a few of these at: http://putty.minhajuddin.com/
Their speeds look impressive. If it can do cold starts with a response time of <200ms, it might become suitable for a lot of our typical web apps. You can actually try it out at: https://wasm.fastlylabs.com/