In the world of tales, Elixir is a magical potion that cures and gives strength. When it comes to programming, Elixir is a language that allows developers to create bug-free applications capable of generating high volumes of data.
Essentially, Elixir is a lifesaver in the tech world as well.
Since its release in 2011, more and more developers have used Elixir to build fault-tolerant, scalable solutions. Slowly but surely, the language is establishing its place in the future of web development.
What is Elixir?
Elixir is a dynamic, functional programming language that allows the building of complex, scalable, and highly fault-tolerant solutions.
Its creator, José Valim, made Elixir after experiencing issues with Ruby, which doesn’t perform well under huge data loads. He decided to create a new language capable of dealing with high data volumes while retaining Ruby’s generators and templates.
So, José built Elixir on top of the Erlang Virtual Machine (VM) BEAM bytecode to maintain its fault-tolerance features and combined them with modern-looking syntax similar to Ruby. He also “borrowed” some of Clojure’s metaprogramming features.
As a result, Elixir has evolved into a fault-tolerant language with high concurrency and many other valuable features. And, since its qualities are essential for modern programs, Elixir’s popularity is rapidly rising.
Top 5 reasons why Elixir is the future of web development
Let’s look at some of the most prominent reasons for Elixir’s growing popularity.
Elixir employs a concurrency model
Due to the significant increase in digital demands, most modern programs experience challenges while providing access to a large number of users simultaneously. However, this isn’t the case with Elixir. It runs on the Erlang virtual machine BEAM, allowing the processing of multiple functions concurrently without any delay.
Many tech giants turn to this language to meet their concurrency needs. For instance, Elixir helps Discord to efficiently manage over 100 million monthly active users and scale their app continuously. With ever-increasing traffic demands, Elixir’s concurrency will undoubtedly remain a desired feature for many future applications.
Productive programming language
The programming language is more productive the more you can accomplish with less code. Elixir provides precisely this kind of productivity. That’s because its core elements are just two: modules and functions. Once you grasp these, it’s super easy to write code and build stunning solutions.
Because Elixir is easy to use, developers may create apps in less time and at a lower cost. Furthermore, thanks to its clean syntax, Elixir enables you to come up with simple yet effective solutions. These user-friendly features are another future-proof benefit that enables businesses to accelerate development processes.
Builds highly scalable solutions
The business app should be scalable. Simply, once your app starts receiving lots of traffic, it must be able to serve more users while remaining reliable. And this holds true both today and in the future. Therefore, many companies look for and will continue to seek programming languages that scale efficiently.
Moreover, choosing a scalable language from the very start means considerably lower future costs. And that’s where Elixir shines. As we’ve mentioned, it runs on top of the Erlang VM and takes advantage of its capabilities. So, Elixir operates with high availability and fault tolerance, allowing engineers to design scalable, reliable solutions.
Enables safe and secure applications
As a functional language, Elixir operates on immutable data. This enables safe concurrent access to the same data while ensuring that no process alters the original value. Furthermore, each request processing phase is visible, making navigation and development safe and secure solutions much easier.
The most compelling evidence of Elixir’s safety and security comes from its use in financial services systems. Solaris, a fintech company, uses Elixir-powered APIs. These straightforward and safe APIs allow their partners to embed Solaris’ digital banking services directly into their products. The company has grown to become Europe’s largest embedded financial platform, highlighting Elixir’s strong applications in the ever-important information security sector.
Elixir’s growing community speaks for itself
The Elixir community is growing rapidly and shows no signs of slowing down. It allows developers to share knowledge and ask any questions regarding the language. Furthermore, Elixir’s core team is always open to innovative community suggestions, maintaining the language’s applicability.
Another way the community contributes to Elixir’s improvement is by providing support and constantly producing new libraries and reusable code. As a result, the language always has tools and features tailored to meet modern development needs while retaining engineers’ satisfaction.
Future-proof alchemy
You have to think outside the box to develop highly successful, future-worthy solutions. And that’s exactly what this language allows companies to do. It has it all: productivity, security, and scalability. So, it’s no wonder numerous well-known companies use Elixir in their systems and apps.
Furthermore, as the world shifts to a digital environment, we can only expect Elixir’s qualities to become even more desirable. Thus, for anyone looking to develop high-performing and scalable future-proof products ― Elixir might be the “magical potion” you’re looking for.
