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by cutler 2653 days ago
Another concern with Elixir is that, like Node, it is optimised for IO, not computation. Take chatbots, for which Elixir is supposed to be ideal - what if my chatbot connects to a computation-intensive AI/NLP model. I'm going to need something else for that, surely? Elixir and Node are good for the orchestration layer but lack the all-round capabilities of, say, the JVM platform.
1 comments

Elixir definitely comes up short on raw computation. However we've been very satisfied with it for implementing a database. Use data oriented design (you want that anyway) and move any CPU intensive part into a native function. It's pretty straightforward to bind a C/C++/Rust library.
Considering the massive growth in AI that makes Elixir only half a solution then unless you're good with low-level languages such as C/C++/Rust. Scala and Clojure, on the other hand, are good for both computation and IO so I don't really see the advantage of Elixir.