Elixir Overview
Welcome to a tutorial on 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.