Re:Ask HN: Why isn't Phoenix/Elixir more mainstream?
by pg_1234 on Friday September 29, 2023 @04:13PM
(#37709559)
Elixir doesn't offer an easily benchmarkable performance boost the way Rust does.
It does offer a boost, but in the form of system reliability in a concurrent environment. This kind of advantage is seldom properly evaluated until AFTER you have a disaster ... by which time you are typically committed to different stack.
For 99% of things, language performance doesn't really matter (it's usually cheaper to just scale up). So you might as well focus on developer experience and hire-ability.
For the 1% where it does matter, drop down to something like Rust, and use the developer-friendly language above as glue.
You see it a lot in Python, where the performance of the runtime itself is kinda crap, but it doesn't matter because it's very developer-friendly. It became the #1 language for high performance data science, thanks to libraries that use C and stuff under the hood.