[petrocrat]

WhatsApp, famously launched and served millions of users with a small team using Elixir. Seems to me that speaks to the language's production capability, or enterprise capability, if you will. Considering that, can you go more into detail about your assertion here?

> But for a long list of reasons, I wouldn't use it for anything other than prototyping/hobby projects.

[cangeroo]

It's an interesting topic, but it seems that presenting an opposing viewpoint is generally downvoted on Hackernews (and likely other social media), so I'm not sure it's worth spending the time.

My position is pragmatic, from a managerial economics perspective, of maximizing value and reducing risk. I suspect that Elixir attracts a fair amount of language enthusiasts, who are somewhat biased when they evaluated the business value of a language choice.

WhatsApp/Discord is a very specific use case, of needing a high number of concurrent users that expect real-time messages when to the same session (e.g. chat/chatroom, "Bob is typing..."). AFAIK, BEAM excels at immutability (lots of reads, like readers in a chatroom) and concurrency (vertical scalability). So those are not appropriate reference use cases for the typical user.

BEAM is notoriously slow, and has been bottom-ranking in Techempower benchmarks. Although that seems to have improved in recent years.

https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#hw=ph&test=json&sect...