[josevalim]

Because those features are accessible, you end-up using them a lot more frequently and find new and exciting ways to use them. For example, I am really happy that Elixir and its tooling does pretty much everything using all cores: compiling code, running tests, generating documentation, etc. and all of this has a direct impact on the developer experience.

The other part is that you can build more efficient systems by relying on this. If you have a machine with 8 cores, it is more efficient to start a single process that can leverage all 8 cores and multiplex on both IO and CPU accordingly. This impacts everything from database utilization, to metrics, third-party APIs, and so on.

The Phoenix web framework also has great examples of using distribution to provide features like distributed pubsub for messaging and presence without external dependencies.

However, when it comes building systems, then I agree with you and I would probably use a queue, because you get other properties from queues such as persistence and making the systems language agnostic.

I hope this clarifies it a bit!

[artellectual]

Exactly right, just the pure fact that it's at your disposal makes you think about problems in a whole new way. For example, I recently just abstracted my solutions away from Redis. I have nothing against redis however removing a dependency makes things more simple, which is important for my setup.

For caching you have SO many options which are already built in, ets, agent, ets + gen_server, or even reaching out for a library like nebulex.

Another example is recurring jobs, you can create a gen_server that will run a job every x hours in roughly 50-100 lines of code depending on how complex your problem is.

I rarely feel the need to reach out for external dependencies. Not that there is anything wrong with that, it's just that you now have a wider array of tools to work with and some problems are just solvable with a couple of lines of code instead of having to reach out for external tooling.

I recently built a distributed work queue, generally in Ruby I would use something like sidekiq, however elixir made me feel like "hey you can write your own" which generally is not recommended since you don't want to re-invent the wheel, but if you are doing something that breaks away from the existing solution, having the ability to craft a custom solution that works for your specific set of problems is extremely powerful, you can get much more creative, and the important thing is it got done fast (I wrote a distributed job scheduler in 2 weeks + 1 week to clean it up and work out the kinks, it's already running stably in production)

[arcticfox]

Cool, thanks José, that helps indeed. The multi-core DX stuff sounds interesting even on its own, production code aside. I hope to check it out soon!