FROM RUBY TO ELIXIR: WHAT NOW ?? Renan Ranelli

Renan Ranelli (Milhouse)

(former) Software Engineer @ Renan Ranelli (Milhouse)

Software Engineer @ Renan Ranelli (Milhouse)

Renan Ranelli (Milhouse)

AGENDA • Why are people talk so much about functional programming (FP)? • A little bit of context on what we are doing with Elixir @ Xerpa • Elixir & Ruby – What's the difference? • The main problems & difficulties we encountered so far • Final points & discussion

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WHAT IS HAPPENING IN THE HARDWARE INDUSTRY? • You should google “no more free lunch” and read the first article. Seriously. • Since I'm already here, I'll give you a primer: – CPU clock is not getting exponentially faster – Transistor number is still growing rapidly – No performance gain for single threaded apps – Concurrency is the next major revolution in how we write software

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> Concurrency is the next major revolution in how we write software > Applications will increasingly need to be concurrent if they want to fully exploit continuing exponential CPU throughput gains > Efficiency and performance optimization will get more, not less, important

This was written in March 2005

2005

In 2005: – Java 5 was hot news. – Windows XP. Vista only in 2007. – No AWS, Twitter, Netflix. – Ruby on Rails launched in December 13th. – Youtube was just founded. – We never have heard of Justin Bieber – I was playing Gunbound & Tibia. No money for WoW.

This was written in March 2005

ELIXIR @ XERPA

ELIXIR @ XERPA

ELIXIR @ XERPA • Our Stack so far: – Phoenix – Postgresql (?!) – Clojurescript (Re-frame/react) – ElasticSearch (?!) – Ruby + Selenium for acceptance tests – Shell + Ansible + AWS for all things

ELIXIR @ XERPA

Elixir is * not * Ruby

(although it ends up to be surprisingly similar) (show RedisProxy code)

ELIXIR >> RUBY • Where Elixir excels over Ruby ? – IMMUTABILITY

ELIXIR >> RUBY • Where Elixir excels over Ruby ? – IMMUTABILITY – THERE IS A COMPILER

ELIXIR >> RUBY • Where Elixir excels over Ruby ? – IMMUTABILITY – THERE IS A COMPILER – IMMUTABILITY

ELIXIR >> RUBY • Where Elixir excels over Ruby ? – IMMUTABILITY – THERE IS A COMPILER – IMMUTABILITY

ELIXIR >> RUBY • Where Elixir excels over Ruby ? – IMMUTABILITY – THERE IS A COMPILER – IMMUTABILITY – Docs & tooling receive much more love (!?)

ELIXIR >> RUBY • Where Elixir excels over Ruby ? – IMMUTABILITY – THERE IS A COMPILER – IMMUTABILITY – Docs & tooling receive much more love (!?) – MACROS (!? ruby doesn't need them!)

ELIXIR >> RUBY • Where Elixir excels over Ruby ? – IMMUTABILITY – THERE IS A COMPILER – IMMUTABILITY – Docs & tooling receive much more love (!?) – MACROS (!? ruby doesn't need them!) – OTP

ELIXIR >> RUBY • Where Elixir excels over Ruby ? – IMMUTABILITY – THERE IS A COMPILER – IMMUTABILITY – Docs & tooling receive much more love (!?) – MACROS (!? ruby doesn't need them!) – OTP – Iex >> Irb (!?)

PHOENIX >> RAILS • Where Phoenix excels over Rails ? – SUPER DUPPER FAST (!?)

PHOENIX >> RAILS • Where Phoenix excels over Rails ? – SUPER DUPPER FAST (!?) – Much easier to setup for high concurrency

PHOENIX >> RAILS • Where Phoenix excels over Rails ? – SUPER DUPPER FAST (!?) – Much easier to setup for high concurrency – Much less magic. Mostly everything is based on simple function calls.

PHOENIX >> RAILS • Where Phoenix excels over Rails ? – SUPER DUPPER FAST (!?) – Much easier to setup for high concurrency – Much less magic. Mostly everything is based on simple function calls. – Views vs Templates.

Now to the not-fun part.

PROBLEMS WE ENCOUNTERED SO FAR • The ecosystem is still very small (and buggy). – No options for monitoring apps (like new relic, appsignal, honeybadger). – No Sidekiq. – ExMachina (elixir's factory girl) is so broken. – No Monads.

PROBLEMS WE ENCOUNTERED SO FAR • The ecosystem is still very small (and buggy). – No usable client for elastic search (?!) – No usable (at the time?) library for exposing jsonapi (?!) – No usable (at the time) library to handle acls (?!) – No usable bindings for ImageMagick (?!) – Releases are so damn hard and un-12factor – Hot code reloads are much much harder than people say – Almost no problems with core libs like Ecto, Plug & Phoenix though.

RUBY STILL HAS THE EDGE IN THESE AREAS: – Ruby can tap into the JVM with Jruby. – Ruby's stdlib has waaaaaaay more stuff out of the box – A *big* and mature ecosystem – A lot of developers willing to work with it – Although Elixir can tap into erlang-land's libraries and tools, they are much harder to use (less googlability, bad/incomplete docs)

bottomline

On Elixir • Elixir is *very promissing*, and has learned a lot from other communities. (e.g. Queryable is an idea from .net's Linq) • You can see that it evolves and taps into the learning experiences of other languages & communities. It still lacks a mature ecosystem but it is gaining traction fast. • If you truly aim to invest yourself in it, you must be ready to get your hands dirt and write a lot of infrastructure you can take for granted in Ruby-land. Do not underestimate the complexity of managing library code + tests + docs + versioning + bug tracking.

On Ruby • Although Ruby is no longer the crème-de-la-crème, it is not stagnant. • Many nice ideas on how to add better concurrency to Ruby. Ruby 3 promises to be 3x faster than Ruby 2, while keeping maximum backwards-compatibility.

OBRIGADO !

@renanranelli /rranelli Renan Ranelli (Milhouse) milhouseonsofware.com