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by polmuz 2220 days ago
Having a queue means you have a distributed system. How do you handle network problems, errors/retries, back pressure? OTP has excellent idiomatic tools for all that and more.
1 comments

Elixir developers who need a queue generally reach for Rabbit (which any language can use), or something backed in a database like rihanna[1] or honeydew[2]. Rolling your own distributed system is very much a last resort, and despite its excellent concurrency characteristics the BEAM still lacks basics such as a battle-tested raft implementation.

[1]https://github.com/samsondav/rihanna [2]https://github.com/koudelka/honeydew

> and despite its excellent concurrency characteristics the BEAM still lacks basics such as a battle-tested raft implementation.

A couple of years ago the RabbitMQ team has published a raft library[1] which they use in their implementation of persistent queues. It has a flexible API and implementing your own state machines is quite straightforward, as it follows the OTP gen_* behaviour paradigm.

And by now, I'd say it's pretty well battle-tested.

[1] https://github.com/rabbitmq/ra

I didn’t know about that - thank you for pointing me at it!