Which companies are using Erlang, and why?

Re:Which companies are using Erlang, and why? by superhawk610 on Monday September 30, 2019 @02:44AM (#21112334)

Not OP, but have used Elixir pretty extensively; the major selling points for me are the friendlier syntax and more active community support, plus with rebar3 + Elixir's seamless Erlang interop you really don't give up anything, you can use any existing Erlang/Elixir libraries with a single syntax. It's pretty great.

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Re:Which companies are using Erlang, and why? by alskdj21 on Monday September 30, 2019 @02:50AM (#21112362)

Haven't touched Erlang but has an entry level knowledge on Elixir. I often heard how easy it is to write macros on Elixir. Can you elaborate on this?

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Re:Which companies are using Erlang, and why? by arjan_sch on Monday September 30, 2019 @04:06AM (#21112763)

One of the big differences between Erlang and Elixir is indeed that Elixir allows you to write macros in the language itself, using quote / unquote constructs just like lisps.

This makes it easy to generate code on compile time, which is then executed in runtime without any performance penalty.

A large part of Elixir itself is actually implemented as macros. For instance, the "unless" construct:

  defmacro unless(condition, do: do_clause, else: else_clause) do
    quote do
      if(unquote(condition), do: unquote(else_clause), else: unquote(do_clause))
    end
  end

(code simplified for clarity)

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Re:Which companies are using Erlang, and why? by fcbrooklyn on Monday September 30, 2019 @11:46AM (#21116626)

And the if-else construct is also a macro. The whole thing ends up being a case I think.

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Re:Which companies are using Erlang, and why? by dnautics on Monday September 30, 2019 @11:39AM (#21116505)

Imho You shouldn't really write macros, they are there for libraries to make it easy to do the right thing with less boilerplate.

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