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Elixir 1.17 released: set-theoretic types in patterns, durations, OTP 27

by clessg on 6/12/24, 11:13 AM with 163 comments

  • by julienmarie on 6/13/24, 1:40 AM

    The last few years the Elixir ecosystem has started to become the simplest solution to so many use cases:

    - Web development with Phoenix and Liveview is immensely enjoyable and fast

    - AI with NX, Axon, Bumblebee

    - Audio and Video streaming and manipulation with Membrane

    - CQRS and Event Sourcing with Commanded

    - Embedded with Nerves to make your own devices

    - Mobile apps with Liveview Native ( in development )

    - Queues, pipelines and batch processing, etc... natively or with GenStage, Broadway or Oban depending on your use case

    but for me, the killer feature is IEX, Elixir's REPL. Being able to interact directly with my running code easily ( in dev or in production ), introspect it, debugging it, is just life changing.

    Adding types is indeed the last piece to the puzzle to bring even more confidence in the code we ship.

  • by gregors on 6/12/24, 12:56 PM

    Elixir and Erlang teams are absolutely killing it over the last few years, not to mention all the work done by the library and book authors out there.

    I've never been more excited about a release. I've been watching commits to both Elixir and OTP for awhile now and I feel Elixir/Erlang has really picked up steam.

    Thanks to everyone involved for making my life easier!

  • by mike1o1 on 6/12/24, 5:03 PM

    I've been using Elixir as a backend for a side project (with a Remix frontend) and it's been really pleasant and productive to work with on the backend. I appreciate how productive LiveView can be, but for my specific case I needed to handle poor network connections and LiveView was (as expected) a poor experience.

    I wish Elixir was able to decouple itself from LiveView in a sense in the minds of developers. Even without LiveView and realtime/channels, just using Elixir as a backend for a simple API has been really fun.

  • by dankai on 6/12/24, 6:36 PM

    I've been building my startup 100% fullstack in elixir, and it's been the most wonderful technology I've ever worked with. I'm evangelising all my serious tech friends about how great it is.

    Now it would be awesome if rabbitMQ and its client would run on OTP 27, would love to upgrade :(

  • by sergiotapia on 6/12/24, 6:50 PM

    Can't say enough good things about Elixir and Phoenix. Now with types coming, it'll get even better.

    By the way, you hear a lot about the BEAM and it's power - but in my experience you can go a LONG LONG LONG way before you ever have to even think about that part of your stack. Phoenix does such a tremendous job abstracting that for you. You just get the gainz with no effort. Other parts of the stack also just abstract that for you.

    Case in point: Oban. You get powerful, flexible and easy to use background jobs for essentially free. Right there in Postgres, with your Elixir code. It's crazy.

    Try it.

  • by auraham on 6/13/24, 5:39 AM

    Aside note: Have any of you used elixir-desktop [1]? It is a wxWidgets + LiveView bundle, pretty much like a Electron app.

    In [2], Wojtek Mach explains how the team behind Elixir build Livebook Desktop. He explains how the project started, some subtle bugs found when building the app for MacOS, some limitations of wxWidgets in Windows, and many other implementation details.

    It would be awesome if the Elixir team releases something like elixir-desktop based on Livebook. That is, forking the Livebook repo and release an official template project for generating desktop applications based on LiveView. Right now, Livebook is distributed as an executable for Windows and Mac. Why not follow the same approach to allow developers to publish self-contained executables pretty much like Electron?

    I am aware of LiveView Native [3] but I think they follow a different direction.

    [1] https://github.com/elixir-desktop/desktop-example-app

    [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kiw6eWKcQbg

    [3] https://native.live/

  • by nelsonic on 6/12/24, 7:45 PM

    Awesome work Elixir & Erlang Devs! <3 Cannot wait for the "no types" excuse to go away for mass adoption of Elixir! Keep up the great progress.

  • by aczerepinski on 6/12/24, 2:11 PM

    For 10 years I’ve been reading about cool Elixir stuff here. Love the language. I gave up on finding a job in Elixir many years ago though after seeing salaries consistently lower than more mainstream languages. It may be the language I’d want to use most, but salary and cool product are more important to me than tech stack so it may never happen. Still fun to follow from afar.

  • by neillyons on 6/12/24, 12:31 PM

    Nice feature in this release is the addition of `get_in/1` which works with structs. eg. `get_in(struct.foo.bar)`

    If `foo` returns `nil`, accessing `bar` won't raise.

  • by pawelduda on 6/12/24, 12:16 PM

    This is it, the final piece I wanted. Looking forward to the further stages. Apart from that, the language is 100% feature-complete as far as I am concerned.

  • by GiorgioG on 6/12/24, 12:08 PM

    Super-excited for this release. I wish someone would put some resources into the Elixir IntelliJ plugin. I've tried, but I just can't enjoy using VSCode (vs IntelliJ based IDEs, Visual Studio, etc.)

  • by bhaney on 6/12/24, 11:50 AM

    I'm excited about the type system so far, but I'm especially excited to hear about what else the type system is going to enable in the future. I remember José describing this as a "gradual gradual type system," where the gradual type system is going to be gradually added in stages, with this being the first stage. Any cool new type-system-related stuff coming up in the next few stages? I'm especially hoping for newly enabled compiler optimizations.

  • by sapiogram on 6/12/24, 12:15 PM

    Does anyone know what they mean by "set-theoretic types"? I'm a PL nerd, but I've never heard this term before.

  • by notemaker on 6/12/24, 11:46 AM

    Really impressed with how thoughtful _and_ fast they are delivering on their type system.

  • by tiffanyh on 6/12/24, 1:10 PM

    How does this compare to Gleam (strong) typing?

    https://gleam.run

  • by mikl on 6/12/24, 9:07 PM

    The introduction of set-theoretic types has truly been a technical tour-de-force. A huge improvement of the language, but in a backwards-compatible fashion.

  • by dimitrisnl on 6/12/24, 12:09 PM

    I'm very happy for this release. I picked up Elixir recently, and the missing a type system was my only pet peeve.

  • by CaptainOfCoit on 6/13/24, 12:33 AM

    > This Elixir version introduces the Duration data type and APIs to shift dates, times, and date times by a given duration, considering different calendars and time zones.

    > We chose the name “shift” for this operation (instead of “add”) since working with durations does not obey properties such as associativity. For instance, adding one month and then one month does not give the same result as adding two months:

    I'm not exactly sure why adding one month and then one month would give a different result compared to just adding two months. Don't you in reality want the same thing? Why is "shift" more useful than "add"?

  • by vohk on 6/13/24, 6:51 AM

    Any recommendations for an entry point into Elixir? I've been teaching myself Rust through resources like Rustlings and 100-exercises-to-learn-rust, and I've found that approach to be pleasantly accessible. I've yet to find something similar for Elixir, whether interactive or just well laid-out.