Elixir-lang.org has a new design (elixir-lang.org)

136 points by bbg2401 6 hours ago

hybridcivic182 4 hours ago

José Valim & team have made such an incredible language and ecosystem. thank you for all the faithful work, especially the run up to 1.20 over this past year

loloquwowndueo 5 hours ago

There’s no obvious way to switch to normal (aka “light”) mode. Dark mode is very difficult for some people (me included) to read.

If you must default to dark mode that’s your choice but I’d love to see a light mode toggle somewhere prominent.

eddd-ddde 2 hours ago

Ideally websites just respect the existing media queries so you don't even have to switch!

madibo3156 4 hours ago

Yeah. You'll notice that there's a mix of light and dark. Some segments are light-on-dark, then it switches to dark-on-light. It appears to me like a "design trend" that's at odds with accessibility. https://www.apple.com does this too.

moomoo11 41 minutes ago

i along with 99% of people don’t mind it

recursivegirth 13 minutes ago

loloquwowndueo 5 minutes ago

SoftTalker an hour ago

I don't really have large monitors by today's standards, and the site looks nice enough but fully half of what I'm looking at is blank space. I don't remember what the old site looked like so don't know if that's really a change.

jolux 2 hours ago

Love the new site!

Minor typo in the Erlang card:

“Elixir also excels at IoT, distributed systems, and everything the Erlang is renowned for”

should probably be “everything the Erlang VM is known for” or “everything Erlang is known for.”

josevalim 2 hours ago

Boom! Fixed, thanks!

999900000999 4 hours ago

Elixir is such an elegant language.

I'm hoping to find a reason to use it soon.

CyberDildonics a minute ago

I'm hoping to find a reason to use it soon.

Do you have a program that doesn't need to run fast?

andruby 2 hours ago

Reading the Erlang ProgProgrammers book by Joe Armstrong made me a better Ruby programmer as it changed my perspective on functional programming and abstractions.

I first reached for Elixir when Ruby couldn't handle large amounts of websocket messages. It really shines in high-concurrency contexts. I also love Phoenix LiveView and have a couple of side-projects running on it.

dnautics 4 hours ago

its been fun building a multiagent personal assistant.

(wip, no guarantees, this is the engine i use)

https://github.com/ityonemo/ce_ce

pluralmonad 4 hours ago

Such a delight to use and the core team seems to always make the right decision.

shevy-java an hour ago

I think most will agree that it improved on Erlang.

For me as a long-term ruby user, though, elixir is not quite as elegant as it could or should have been. Even simple things such as "defmodule Xyz do" feels weird to me.

sph 5 hours ago

No mention of AI and LLM in the front page. Life is good.

phoghed 3 hours ago

Thankfully you were here to make sure we didn’t forget about it for even one post

eikenberry 4 hours ago

They have a Machine Learning section on the front page. Just have to scroll down a bit, under the "Use Elixir for" section.

nozzlegear 3 hours ago

I don't think Machine Learning falls under what most people consider "AI" and "LLM" these days, even if they're technically intertwined.

Jtsummers 3 hours ago

Onavo 4 hours ago

But I bet the landing page was made with AI assistance.

sph 4 hours ago

vopi 3 hours ago

reliablereason 4 hours ago

It certainly looks like a Claude design to some extent; not all they way however.

bbg2401 4 hours ago

It feels less sloppy than most obviously AI generated landing pages.

The only sloppy aspects that stand out to me are the needless animations/transitions.

grahac 6 hours ago

This is great! Now waiting for the forum UI update too! :)

Hoping Elixir continues to thrive. It is such a great language (and such a great language for AI coding too!)

Stromgren 5 hours ago

In fact it came out as the absolute best in a comparison by Tencent (1). See table 4. It’s more than a year old though.

1. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.09101

alberth 6 hours ago

Elixir is great.

OT: I wish more funding & development effort went into BEAM itself on making it more performant.

Note: I’m not talking concurrency. I’m talking pure raw performance.

Seems like it’s been a one person show for over a decade on making it faster.

josevalim 5 hours ago

There are multiple people working on the JIT within the last 5-6 years. The WhatsApp folks also contribute meaningfully.

I suspect once the Erlang/OTP team squeezes all performance in the JIT, they will look into optimizing across modules, which will probably open up many new possibilities, but it requires rethinking some runtime primitives.

ashton314 2 hours ago

A few years ago, I was working on an interpreter implemented in elixir for a domain specific language. It was a pretty basic metacircular interpreter. It relied heavily on function signature dispatch. When I tried breaking up the massive “interpret” function across modules, performance tanked. I got it all back by using some macro shenanigans, but understandably the team did not like this.

Knowing what I know now, I would’ve tried to push for a threaded interpreter to get rid of the runtime overhead of dispatching altogether. I don’t know if they’ve changed the architecture of that module much since I left :-)

alberth 4 hours ago

Hi Jose

You’re an inspiration for many. Thank you.

I’m curious to know what your top 3 hopes for BEAM itself are for the coming years (in any area that you think would make it better).

josevalim 4 hours ago

ch4s3 6 hours ago

It’s pretty hard to make things like math faster for real world use cases in a bytecode interpreter.

dmpk2k 6 hours ago

It's a JIT nowadays. Admittedly an extremely simple one, to minimize compile times and maintenance overhead.

You can get substantial performance improvements by using guards though. See what Wings3D does with is_float() everywhere in hot numeric-heavy code.

dnautics 4 hours ago

i ran a quick experiment where instead of doing boxing the way its done in the beam currently, i used a different boxing (NaN strategy and there was a 10x speedup

jimbokun 5 hours ago

Java and Javascript run times do really well at that.

tosti 3 hours ago

I followed the links to docs and getting started, but it says page not found.

The URL: https://elixir.hexdocs.pm/getting-started.html

josevalim 3 hours ago

It should be fixed soon (deploying now). Thank you!!!

allanmacgregor 6 hours ago

Looks pretty good, I like that they are highlighting the potential uses for elixir.

losvedir 6 hours ago

To me, it seems one of the killer use cases for Elixir (/Erlang) is its distributed cluster capability. Does anyone have experience with that or case reports to share? I've used Elixir quite a bit professionally, but mostly as just a "nicer Rails" with horizontally scalable but otherwise independent Phoenix apps in your traditional Kubernetes setup, which seems to me to kind of missing out on its main purpose.

toast0 4 hours ago

It's been a while, but I used to work at WhatsApp and we used Erlang distribution heavily. I understand the clusters have gotten really huge since I left.

It's super handy. There's no security barrier between nodes. It's a headache if your network is unreliable.

For a chat app, messaging someone becomes a series of steps:

a) look up if they're online (send a message to the presence database service)

b) if you got a process id back, that's the process connected to the user, so send it the message. The process could be on the same machine or not, but the sending api is the same. This is the special part: few other environments make arbitrary messaging between processes/threads/tasks/whathaveyou so pervasive.

c) if you don't get a process id back, the user is offline; send the message to the offline database.

jomcgi 5 hours ago

Also interested in hearing about this! I built an elixir k8s control plane recently and kept expecting to reach for it but it never really made sense when it was controlling golang daemonsets.

My usecase is less independent though, that control plane is orchestrating like Lambda/fly.io style workloads on top of firecracker: https://jomcgi.dev/ember

org3 5 hours ago

I've worked a little bit with distributed Elixir using `Horde.DynamicSupervisor` on Kubernetes. Apparently there's other options like 'swarm' and DynamicSupervisor [1]. It'd be great for clear analysis of the benefits these kinds of abstractions bring vs non-BEAM approaches.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZmDEUeHeVI

davidw 5 hours ago

Elixir/Erlang works very well in a semi-embedded environment where you need a higher level command and control component that behaves in a deterministic way and is pretty robust.

I was involved, years ago, in using Erlang on these devices: https://www.icare-world.com/us/product/icare-eidon/

It was a lot of fun and there were some very interesting challenges for everyone involved.

aejm 2 hours ago

I think this version is an improvement over the old one! In particular how it highlights the packages in the ecosystem better.

swingboy 3 hours ago

On the first syntax example: there’s something funny to me about using three pipe operator and four different functions to turn “hello world” into “Hello World”.

josevalim 3 hours ago

That's a good point. It is meant to be an introductory example but I will see if I can come up with something else! Thanks!

EDIT: shipped!

jeanlucas 6 hours ago

Nice! The showcase of companies is really nice

asa400 5 hours ago

Looks great! There are some style quirks with cutoff elements in Firefox 152.0.6: https://imgur.com/a/OtnESi7

binaryturtle 5 hours ago

Site doesn't work for me (older Firefox). Looks like there's no CSS and some Javascript error (probably makes it bail out loading the CSS?)

pwg 4 hours ago

It also does not load if Javascript is blocked.

bbg2401 6 hours ago

zuzululu 4 hours ago

I appreciate Elixir but the problem is the job market/talent pool is tiny compared to other existing languages.

If you buy into the Elixir stack then you now have constraint you could've avoided entirely by avoiding it.

Also for devs there seems to be no premium offered for this talent pool scarcity. With LLMs I think language-specialists are redundant in a large scheme of things. ex) at one of my current remote jobs, I shipped an entire telecom infrastructure with barely knowing Elixir and we brought on contractors to audit the code and they found no issues.

toast0 4 hours ago

> appreciate Elixir but the problem is the job market/talent pool is tiny compared to other existing languages.

> I shipped an entire telecom infrastructure with barely knowing Elixir and we brought on contractors to audit the code and they found no issues.

Erlang/Elixir experience is rare, because it's not widely used and the teams are small. It's not worth trying to hire for it. Hire for people who can figure it out on the go (amd are willing to give it a try).

You did it, hire other people who seem likely to be able to.

zuzululu an hour ago

as a SWE this is not a good sign. it means the job market is slowly transitioning into temp work like economics. The value I got out of the Elixir contractors was immense since it not only proved that we can get a huge bulk of the work done without specialists and use them on demand for audit for a few months before AI this would've been not been possible.

normal market dynamics suggest scarcity demand premiums but this is not the case with software developers it seems.

stanmancan an hour ago

If you vibe coded an entire telecom infrastructure and an external audit found no issues then it sounds like you might need to find better auditors.

zuzululu an hour ago

both contracts have over 10 years of experience with Elixir and one of them have written a widely used library. I think you are tad out of touch with the job market and with where agentic coding is right now.

stanmancan 34 minutes ago

dnautics 3 hours ago

i hired a biologist (for my pharma startup) and she produced feature ideas for our internal stack and was guiding claude to write idiomatic code with feedback from my reviews with no coding experience. realistically if you want to start an elixir company today you need one consciencious senior that likes code review and any number of juniors with minimal competency and sufficient curiosity.

Starlevel004 5 hours ago

Why does it have like 0.1s animations?

josevalim 5 hours ago

Can you clarify which ones? We will be glad to improve them (or feel free to send a PR).

phplovesong 5 hours ago

I guess elixir is a nice lang for the niche of erlang. But its dynamic (the "type system" is really meh at best) its not suited for real world use.

If i go full dynamic, why not use pure erlang instead?

pluralmonad 4 hours ago

Maybe try and build something and see for yourself? Saying elixir is not fit for real world use shows how little experience with it you have.

ch4s3 4 hours ago

Have you tried it since the new type system rolled out?

dnautics 3 hours ago

> not suited for real world use.

I hope you don't use discord or rely on pagerduty.

ModernMech 5 hours ago

Ugh, it looks like all the other LLM generated language webpages. It's formulaic at this point. I'd hoped a language like Elixir would be able to hire some people to do it.

josevalim 5 hours ago

The Software Mansion folks designed it and we actually iterated on the designs on Figma, having discussions as humans, and exploring alternatives. They were lovely to work with.

I also worked on all of the copy myself, collecting feedback from core maintainers as I went. The new tagline was a suggestion from Theo which we iterated on. I did use LLMs as an assistant, but I did not ask it to generate the content.

Might as well use LLMs for the whole thing next time, since we will be accused of doing so anyway! :D

ch4s3 34 minutes ago

Ignore the haters, it looks very good.

ModernMech 5 hours ago

Shame then that despite all that, they landed on the same design used by every "I asked an LLM to make me a language and a website this weekend here's what it spit out" project. I mean, I'm not saying it looks bad or is a bad result. Just it's very similar to other things that have put in much less effort.

pests 4 hours ago

ia 4 hours ago

Pay08 4 hours ago

This is how every second website has looked for the past 10 years.

acedTrex 5 hours ago

Its pretty snappy/responsive for me at least so thats good. Normally LLM slop sites are pretty at first but sluggish as hell. So some level of skill went into this one.

shevy-java an hour ago

Looks nice. But it would be more important to clean up elixir itself. So many things are unnecessary syntax-wise. At the least elixir made working with erlang easier, so they solved that part.

stanmancan an hour ago

Such as?

arikrahman 5 hours ago

I prefer https://jank-lang.org/ new re-design, and the approach of a more step-wise refinement.

__float 5 hours ago

How is this language related to Elixir? Or are you just commenting that another language has a website?

arikrahman 4 hours ago

They had a recent re-design last week.