Elixir

A dynamic, functional language for the Erlang VM.

Elixir compiles to BEAM bytecode and runs on the same virtual machine as Erlang, inheriting its industrial-strength concurrency and fault-tolerance properties. The language brings a friendlier Ruby-like syntax to Erlang's "let it crash" supervision-tree philosophy, plus modern features like protocols (a typeclass- style dispatch mechanism) and a powerful macro system.

José Valim started Elixir in 2011 while working at Plataformatec. The Phoenix web framework, which Chris McCord released in 2014, became the canonical reason most developers come to Elixir: LiveView in particular has popularised a server-rendered, stateful- session approach to web UI that requires far less JavaScript than typical SPA frameworks.

Elixir is widely used at Discord (whose voice and chat backends use it), at Pinterest (notification systems), at WhatsApp (small amounts), and across many smaller companies that need to handle many concurrent connections. The Hex package manager and Mix build tool give the ecosystem a coherent feel that older Erlang projects often lacked.

License: Apache-2.0

Category: Language

Website: https://elixir-lang.org/

Install

Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install elixir
Fedora/RHEL:   sudo dnf install elixir
Arch:          sudo pacman -S elixir
macOS:         brew install elixir

Authors

José Valim (creator)
Elixir core team

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