[mattste]

I 100% agree about Elixir and its surrounding ecosystem being almost perfect. It's insane how simple the building blocks are and how easy the code is to read and write.

Here are a few pain points I've ran into: 1. Typespecs leave something to be desired compared to other type systems 2. Maps vs structs and easily using one in place of the other

Things that my team would like to see: 1. Components in addition to templates as a first-class citizen in Phoenix. My team loves React because of the component model even though we hardly use an insane amount of interactivity.

[joerichsen]

If you are interested in a React like component library built on top of LiveView you should check out Surface http://surface-demo.msaraiva.io/

[benzible]

Seconding the recommendation to check out Surface! From the docs:

Surface is a server-side rendering component library that allows developers to build rich interactive user-interfaces, writing minimal custom Javascript.

Features: * An HTML-centric templating language with built-in directives (:for, :if, ...) and syntactic sugar for attributes (inspired by Vue.js). * Components as modules - they can be stateless, stateful, renderless or compile-time. * Declarative properties - explicitly declare the inputs (properties and events) of each component. * Slots - placeholders declared by a component that you can fill up with custom content. * Contexts - allows a parent component to share data with its children without passing them as properties.. * Compile-time checking of components and their properties. * Integration with editor/tools for warnings/errors, syntax highlighting, jump-to-definition, auto-completion (soon!) and more.

[jswny]

Hey, just a friendly Elixir user here! Could you explain why you think that maps vs. structs is a pain point? I found this interesting because I personally really like how they are so similar, because you can almost always manipulate a struct like a map, just like you'd expect. It lets you use standard operations for working with structs.

[dnautics]

Not GP, but: You can't use trivially use [] dereferencing notation with structs, or, for that matter get_in or put_in, without first making it access protocol compliant (which maybe you shouldn't do? I haven't figured that out for myself yet). A common use case for me is initializing a GenServer with a kwl, which is nice for your code prettiness, but you'd like to also support maps, because that fits with how the internal state of the GenServer looks. Then when you go to refactor your GenServer to use a struct because you prefer a more solid typesystem, you can run into a minor stumbling block and slightly uglier code. Not insurmountable though, and you're writing tests right? Once those tests pass you've got nothing to worry about.

[1_player]

Making the conversion from/to Map and (keyword) list explicit makes sense, as they have very different access patterns: keyword lists really are not suited for random access unless very small.

And in general Erlang and Elixir have very little automatic type conversions, if any.

But maps and structs are interchangeable, I don't get why using one or the other would make your GenServer code any different. A struct is just a map with an additional field called "__struct__".