[cutety]

Would you be able to give an example or two where you would reach for go vs elixir and vice-versa?

I’ve tinkered with Go, and while it was fairly enjoyable to work with on the small scale, but the lack of generics and constant err != nil checks, and Go 2 on the horizon, I decided to hold off on building anything non-trivial with it.

I’m currently rewriting a Rails app into smaller elixir components, the Rails app is mostly consists of several potentially long running processes that gathers large amounts of data from various sources, does some light transformations, and then combines it and outputs it in various forms. Elixir has been immensely more pleasurable to write in, as OTP, along with things like GenStage and Flow, seem like a perfect fit for this task. And, while go’s channels are cool, they don’t seem nearly as powerful as elixirs actor model/OTP — at least for this example.

The one advantage of Go I can immediately think of is using it for some networking heavy app, which is an area Elixir/Erlang has room for improvement, as making some simple outside http requests isn’t nearly as dead simple, iirc.

[chimen]

Sure, here's a few, personal opinions:

- Some programmers don't like functional programming (I'm not one of them)

- Go has static typing and I find it really cuts away bugs

- Go is backed by giants and has the horse power to push forward regardless of "Github stars"

- Go is easy to compile and run on most/many platforms

- I find myself more able to understand third party code

As a web developer, would I use Go as opposed to Phoenix/Elixir? Yes, I am actually using it in production on a fairly big project [1]. I tried Phoenix and I found it "weird" for my liking. The authentication part of a web app was a real deal-braker for me = too complicated to implement (not bad, just too complicated).

I'm the type of guy that brainstorms (90% of my projects are always "close to completion" though) a lot of ideas and wants to go up and running really fast. I can't do that with Python/Elixir/Ruby without many tests written because I don't trust the code/myself all that much.

Where would I use Elixir/Phoenix:

- a chat/support app or anything that relies heavily on websockets

- real-time apps (related to first point)

- apps that rely heavily on distributed tasks

[1] https://typely.com

[aczerepinski]

I'm not the parent poster, but I love both Elixir and Go and have both in production at work. My two cents:

Phoenix is a joy to work with, so I like Elixir for the full-stack crud apps that you might otherwise do in Rails. The server-rendered HTML experience is every bit as painless as it is in Rails (this is not a selling point for Go), you get very good tooling for free, Elixir is fun to write, depending on the application the channels/websocket stuff can be a huge lift, etc.

I like Go for stuff that doesn't have a web front end - APIs, CLI tools, background services that need to be fast, etc. In my personal experience based on the small number of Elixir & Go apps I've written (only a few of each), Go gets the edge for performance and server cost. It isn't as quick to prototype in Go as it is in Elixir, but the type system pays off over the long haul.

Again just my quick take - both are really great IMO.

[weberc2]

> the lack of generics

Earnest question: isn't Elixir dynamically typed? If so, how is Go's type system worse? You can always drop down to `interface{}` (the dynamic type) if you like, after all.

> And, while go’s channels are cool, they don’t seem nearly as powerful as elixirs actor model/OTP — at least for this example.

I haven't used Elixir, but I suspect this is true. Elixir/Erlang are probably the only two languages that probably have a better concurrency story than Go; however, there are other facets (tooling, deployment story, learning curve, etc) to consider in choosing a programming language, and I think Go is a really strong language on balance.

[dragonwriter]

> Earnest question: isn't Elixir dynamically typed? If so, how is Go's type system worse?

Elixir has built in support for type specifications and supports static analysis for (among other things) typechecking via dialyzer, a static analysis tool from the Erlang distribution for the BEAM VM.

[weberc2]

Are these widely-used? When I tried kicking the tires on Elixir, it seemed like type annotations (specifications?) weren't used in practice, and they also seemed pretty clumsy (I didn't try hard, to be fair).

[pdimitar]

Elixir and Go are not mutually exclusive though.

As another sibling comment said: they serve different niches. I'd always reach for Elixir/Phoenix for any web app, or even API (if it's a big app). Also anything that requires heavy concurrency -- web spiders, data collectors of many kinds, scatter/gather flows (or any multi-stage flows; Elixir makes those processes brain-dead easy to code) -- then Erlang/Elixir are a no-brainer. People keep wrongfully underestimating them.

But if I am to write a CLI app or a very heavy-duty network daemon, Go is IMO hands down unbeaten and the best possible choice. Also anything that requires serious number crunching.

[weberc2]

> Elixir and Go are not mutually exclusive though.

To be clear, I claimed nothing to the contrary. :) I only argued that concurrency isn't the only criteria in choosing a programming language for a particular project.

[pdimitar]

True. I mostly wrote my reply to help future readers.

Sorry, didn't mean to leave you with the impression that you misworded your comment! :)

[orwin]

I wrote a small supervisord ripoff in go just after its launch, it was at the same time frustrating and enjoyable. I will have a week off in less than a month, do you think i should build a similar elixir app just to learn the language? Or do you have any idea of a better well known programm to build to "learn" the language in a week?

[wrestlerman]

Don't want to be that guy, but imo one week is not enough to even "learn" Elixir. To be honest it depends on your previous experience, of course. But the problems is, that there a lot of books, but there are not that much code examples in the world. There are some Phoenix open sourced projects, but I didn't see that much OTP in them.