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Elixir Overview

Welcome to a tutorial on Elixir.

 

Elixir

Elixir is a dynamic, functional language designed to build scalable and maintainable applications. Interestingly, Elixir leverages the Erlang VM, popularly known for running low-latency, distributed, and fault-tolerant systems. In addition, the Erlang VM has also been used in web development and the embedded software domain successfully.

Elixir is a functional, dynamic language built on top of Erlang and the Erlang VM. 

In 1986, the Erlang language was originally written by Ericsson to help solve telephony problems such as distribution, fault-tolerance, and concurrency. Thus. Elixir is a functional, dynamic language built on top of Erlang and the Erlang VM. However, Erlang was a language written by José Valim.

 

Features of Elixir

The features of Elixir are highlighted below.

  • Scalability: Every Elixir code runs inside lightweight isolated processes and exchange information through messages.
  • Fault Tolerance: supervisors are provided by Elixir which describes how to restart parts of a system when things go wrong by going back to a known initial state that is guaranteed to work. It ensures your system’s application/platform is never down.
  • Functional Programming: This typically promotes a coding style that assists developers to write code that is short, fast, and maintainable.
  • Build tools: Elixir provides sets of development tools. We have the Mix, which is a tool that makes it easy to create projects, manage tasks, run tests, and many more. Also, it has its own package manager known as Hex.
  • Erlang Compatibility: Elixir runs on the Erlang VM thereby granting developers complete access to Erlang’s ecosystem.