[mgdev]

Devil's advocate:

What would it take to programmatically port/transpile the core of Erlang's ecosystem to Elixir?

Pick the killer app to serve as the root node (Phoenix?) and walk back to the leaves (OTP, popular libraries, etc). Do a 1-time cutover of literally everything. Fork/port ERTS (incl BEAM) to make Elixir-native and rebrand it. Etc.

While I generally agree that "rewriting as bad" there is something to be said about the importance of _ease_ when bootstrapping and scaling an ecosystem. You're either stealing mindshare from an established ecosystem, or you're capturing new minds as they come in.

IMO Elixir/OTP is too radically different from other very-large ecosystems to benefit from transfer learning for junior/mid-level people (great similarity w/other smaller fringe ones, like Ruby, Clojure, etc, but that won't get us there), and the most senior people fall into the "it's all the same at the end of the day" trap and don't put in the energy absent some strong business driver. So you really need to reduce even the shallowest cognitive bumps to get escape velocity.

[jolux]

I had this same thought because I think Elixir and Erlang are actually similar enough that translating between them directly may be feasible and have decent results. I don’t really think forking is a good idea though. As I understand it most BEAM maintenance is actually done by Ericsson, and I’m not sure the Elixir community has the resources to sustain a project like that. It seems like it would also create bad blood with the Erlang community and risk breaking compatibility eventually, which would be a huge loss for users of libraries like Ranch and Hackney.

[wink]

As someone coming from erlang (but not a huge ton of experience in it) my only gripe is the difference in string/binary handling, everything else is quite smooth, totally comparable to Clojure+Java libs.

[srevenant]

This is what I too have wondered.

I'm curious if there are more devs in elixir or erlang.

I'm also curious if it'd be easy enough to have elixir->erlang transpiling, so those wanting from elixir could pull it.

[hauleth]

But what would be a point of doing that?