The discussion centers on whether Gleam's ergonomic design and type safety make it a superior choice for AI-assisted development compared to mainstream languages, despite its smaller ecosystem. A significant portion of the conversation is dedicated to debating the community's political activism and code of conduct, with some users citing these as deterrents while others defend them as standard anti-harassment measures.
137 readable replies · Supporting reply 1 · Supporting reply 2 · Supporting reply 3 · Supporting reply 4elixir-lang
elixir
Elixir2012–2026
elixir-lang / elixir
elixir
Simple from zero to scale
87Distinct people
109Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
26.7KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Simple from zero to scale
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
If you haven't read the code for how Elixir handles Unicode support [0] I highly recommend doing so. At compile time it reads from several Unicode Character Database text files…
careersuicide used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
- elixir-ecto/ecto · linked in 3 of the same discussions
- phoenixframework/phoenix · linked in 3 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 6:01:08 PM UTC.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year109 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2012-05-25 17:27:18 UTC to 2026-02-21 11:01:10 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2012 | 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2013 | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 1 | 2 |
| 2014 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 7 | 5 | 2 |
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 9 | 4 | 5 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 12 | 7 | 5 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 12 | 3 | 9 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 10 | 2 | 8 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 7 | 2 | 5 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 9 | 5 | 4 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 7 | 2 | 5 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 2 | 3 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 6 | 1 | 5 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 12 | 5 | 7 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 7 | 2 | 5 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
From the project README
An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.
Read the project’s introduction
Elixir is a programming language designed for building scalable
and maintainable applications.
For more about Elixir, installation and documentation,
check Elixir's website.
Bug reports
For reporting bugs, visit our issue tracker and follow the steps
for reporting a new issue. Please disclose security vulnerabilities
privately in our Security page.
All currently open bugs related to Elixir are listed in the issues tracker.
The Elixir team uses the issues tracker to focus on actionable items,
including planned enhancements in the short and medium term. We also do
our best to label entries for clarity and to ease collaboration.
Our actionable item policy has some important consequences, such as:
Proposing new features as well as requests for support, help, and
guidance must be done in their own spaces, detailed next.
Issues we have identified to be outside of Elixir's scope,
such as an upstream bug, will be closed (and requested to be moved
elsewhere if appropriate).
We actively close unrelated and non-actionable issues to keep the
issues tracker tidy. If you believe we got something wrong, drop a
comment and we can always reopen the issue.
By keeping the overall issues tracker tidy and organized, the community
can easily peek at what is coming in new releases and also get involved
by commenting on existing issues and submitting pull requests. Please
remember to keep the tone positive and be kind! For more information,
see the Code of Conduct.
Proposing new features
You can submit proposals to the Elixir Core mailing list, either through
the web interface or by subscribing to it at elixir-lang-core+subscribe@googlegroups.com.
Remember to include a clear problem description, compare the proposed solution
to existing alternatives in the Elixir ecosystem (and in other languages if
possible), and consider the potential impact your changes will have on the
codebase and community. For these reasons, we strongly advise you to refine
ideas and gather feedback in community spaces (ElixirForum, Discord, etc)
before submission. Our website includes a general outline of the language
history and its current development focus.
Once a proposal is accepted, it will be added to the issue tracker.
Features and bug fixes that have already been merged and will be included
in the next release are then "closed" and added to the changelog
before release.
Compiling from source
For the many different ways to install Elixir,
see our installation instructions on the website.
However, if you want to contribute to Elixir, you will need to compile from source.
First, install Erlang.
After that, clone this repository to your machine, compile and test it:
git clone https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir.git
cd elixir
make
Note: if you are running on Windows,
this article includes important notes for compiling Elixir from source
on Windows.
In case you want to use this Elixir version as your system version,
you need to add the bin directory to your PATH environment variable.
When updating the repository, you may want to run make clean before
recompiling. For deterministic builds, you should set the environment
variable ERL_COMPILER_OPTIONS=deterministic.
Contributing
Contributions to Elixir are always welcome! Before you get started, please check
out our CONTRIBUTING.md file. There you will find detailed
guidelines on how to set up your environment, run the test suite, format your
code, and submit pull requests.
Note you must disclose the use of coding agents and AI written code in your
contributions. See the "Using AI and coding agents" in CONTRIBUTING.md.
Important links
Elixir Documentation
Elixir Core Mailing list (development)
Code of Conduct
Issues tracker
Changelog
Security Policy
Open Source Policy
License
"Elixir" and the Elixir logo are registered trademarks of The Elixir Team.
Elixir source code is released under Apache License 2.0.
Check LICENSE file for more information.
Read the full README on GitHubWhat Hacker News says
12 sourcesThis is very good feedback and show flaws in areas that could be improved. Thank you!
I will add some comments below but they are not meant to dispute your claims but to find places where we can improve.
> The log messages suck. If I want to use them in production and actually ship them to ELK or similar, the format really sucks.
Do you mean the Logger messages? Their format is customizable. Can we make this clearer?
> Getting information on what happens at compile time vs run time is hard.
Which kind of information do you need? Is it something that would fit the meta-programming guide on the website? Or maybe we are missing a more detailed compiler guide?
> How do you handle operating system signals? like when your autoscale group decides to scala down and you get a SIGTERM with some time to handle it, what do you do? wrapper scripts suc
Read the rest
k.
It was not possible cleanly until OTP 20, so it is fairly new. At least, from 19.x onwards, the VM will shutdown cleanly on SIGTERM - which means shutting down all applications and supervision trees. A lot of guides (including the Elixir guides) cover supervisor only through the fault tolerance perspective, while they also encapsulate the start-up and shutdown logic. I have opened an issue for this here: https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/issues/6479
> What command do I run? when do I run an app vs compiling it? What If I want command line args? Where's a good example of writing an app, which is a daemon, and using an escript to reconfigure it at runtime?
Running your code is a matter of starting your application. We don't really have a `main` procedure as an entry point. Your system is designed as a series of applications and you start them. If you are using mix, it should be a matter of `mix run --no-halt`. If you are using releases, it automatically starts the system for you. Where would you expect to find this information? Did you see `mix run` at all? Maybe in the escripts page we should point to `mix run` as it seems an `escript` is really not required in your case?
> The error messages. Holy hell. What actually caused a pattern match to not work? what is it expecting? especially a few function calls deep - like interaction between tuples and arrays and keyword lists.
Those particular error message were fixed in Elixir v1.5 (with OTP 20+). Pull request is here: https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/pull/6127
> Flow / Genstage and getting them into a supervision tree? what's the best practices.
Please open up an issue. If this is not clear form the documentation, it is a "bug" in the docs.
It is also worth mentioning that Ben Marx, Bruce Tate and I are working on book called "Adopting Elixir"
(https://pragprog.com/book/tvmelixir/adopting-elixir). The last three chapters focus exclusively on production aspects and it answers many of the questions here (log configuration, system termination, how to run it, design, etc).
> The error messages. Holy hell. What actually caused a pattern match to not work? what is it expecting?
Elixir 1.5 has introduced improved messages for pattern matching errors in function clauses: https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/blob/v1.5/CHANGELOG.md...
In Why Elixir (2014)The docs for Mix are decent. You can start here:
https://hexdocs.pm/mix.
When you are trying to get help w/ a specific task, you check checkout the mix tasks docs:
https://hexdocs.pm/mix/Mix.Tasks.Deps.Get.html#content
And honestly, I often just look at the source code:
https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/tree/master/lib/mix
The Elixir Slack channel is pretty amazing, too:
https://elixir-slackin.herokuapp.com/
In How Discord Scaled Elixir to 5M Concurrent UsersAccording to Wikipedia, Discord's initial release was March 2015. Elixir hit 1.0 in September 2014 [0]. That's impressively early for adoption of a language for prototyping and for production.
[0] https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/releases/tag/v1.0.0
In How Discord Scaled Elixir to 5M Concurrent UsersRelated: Dig into your language's source code and code of major libraries! Your standard lib is probably the best examples of idiomatic code and efficient code that you're going to have access to, written by the authors of the language itself. You'll notice bugs, inconsistencies and poor docs which gives you opportunities to contribute upstream, at the same time making you read more and learn how particular features work under the hood, which might give you new perspectives in your own code.
In Java, this might be java.util.Collections package, or java.util.Concurrent. or in C++ that might be Boost. In Elixir, I start with Kernel.ex[0]
https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/blob/master/lib/elixir...
In Learn to Read CodeElixir 1.4.5 – fully compatible with Erlang/OTP 20
2 points · Open discussionThis is part of the Elixir standard library
https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/List.html#myers_difference/2
https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/blob/master/lib/elixir...
In The Myers diff algorithm: part 1> * Bus factor of 1?
The core team is made of six members: @josevalim, @fishcakez, @ericmj, @lexmag, @whatyouhide and @true_droid. We have more than 500 contributors on GitHub, it is an accessible codebase. The areas where the bus factor is actually 1 are very rare (and when I can I delegate work to minimize that).
> * No visibility of improvement process (i.e. PEP)?
All planned improvements are currently in the issues tracker: https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/issues. It is a short list because it is a stable language and the focus is on the ecosystem rather than the language.
Proposals are sent before hand to elixir-lang-core mailing list for discussion.
> * Long term support?
List of consultancies currently involved with Elixir: https://github.com/doomspork/elixir-companies#consulting
Plus Plataformatec has been doing and supportin
Read the rest
g Elixir for 5 years and Erlang Solutions has been supporting Erlang for way longer than that and they also provide Elixir support.
Seems like a lot of hoops to jump through, I wonder why they want to use Gerrit. Meanwhile Elixir you open a PR and Jose and the gang address it quickly.
4 open PR's! https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/pulls
In Go Proposal: Accept GitHub PRsYes, I can confirm this. Development on Elixir (https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir) is done in the open and on GitHub.
In Programming languages that are actively developed on GitHub