[chrismorgan]

I'm surprised by this ElixirConf thing.

I've been involved in the Rust community, a considerably larger, more active and more mature community, and I would consider a RustConf still a little premature.

Is there really enough interest in it? How many people are expected to attend? How many are needed to attend to break even in some manner?

[josevalim]

It is hard to compare communities of programming languages (even though I would be extremely interested in such data!). The only data I have seen around is this graph comparing the popularity on Github and the number of issues in Stack Overflow: http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2014/01/22/language-rankings-1-14...

Note Julia, Rust and Elixir are quite close to each other (which is nice considering they are about the same age). So, based on this data, I wouldn't classify Rust's community as considerably larger than Elixir's. Although Mozilla definitely helps Rust get some exposure!

Also I believe Elixir is more stable than Rust since Elixir runs on top of an existing Virtual Machine which helps us bootstrap the ecosystem and also skip a lot of "infrastructure work". We have also been avoiding breaking changes and doing deprecation cycles for almost a year now (sometimes it is unavoidable though) and Elixir has already 3 books in development (by O'Reilly, Manning and Pragmatic Programmers) with Elixir v1.0 planned for this summer.

Just to be clear, I am not knocking on Rust, just assessing the development stage of both languages (and please correct me if I got something wrong).

I am not sure about the conference details though, as I am just helping promote it, but wasn't there something like 20 or 30 people at the first RubyConf in US? We all need to start somewhere. :)

[chrismorgan]

I just did some quick comparisons of my own.

Rust, by the way, goes back further than 2012; it became public in 2010.

IRC:

- irc://irc.mozilla.org/#rust: 480 people

- irc://chat.freenode.net/#elixir-lang: 158 people

On GitHub:

- mozilla/rust: 414 watchers, 4,776 stargazers, 993 forks.

- elixir-lang/elixir: 217 watchers, 2,317 stargazers, 323 forks.

Reddit:

- /r/rust: 3,754 rustaceans, ~30 users here now, 172 posts in the last month

- /r/elixir: 448 developers, ~6 users here now, 14 posts in the last month

Mailing lists:

- rust-dev (it hasn't been split yet like elixir's are and is mostly development stuff; /r/rust is used more for other talk): 50 threads this month

- elixir-lang-talk: 45 threads this month

- elixir-lang-core: 23 threads this month

Stack Overflow

- [rust]: 294 questions

- [elixir]: 119 questions

Google Trends: https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=rust%20programming,e... shows "rust programming" at around 3× "elixir programming"

I agree that elixir is a little closer to being a mature language (for Rust, 1.0 is not expected for some months yet, though probably still this year), and the elixir community does appear to be more active and mature than I had thought, but overall it still looks to me as though Rust has at the very least the larger community (I'll drop the active claim out of laziness and the mature claim for insufficient evidence) by a considerable way.

[josevalim]

Oh wow, thank you for the data, that's great! I agree with your conclusion too.

I thought Rust was from 2012 based on Wikipedia. It seems they choose 2012 due to the first alpha release. Elixir is theoretically from 2011 but you couldn't really use it for anything... the first actual release was in May 2012. Anyway, it doesn't matter much, just curiosities!