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
9 sourcesOk, we changed to that from https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/releases/tag/v1.11.0. Thanks!
In Elixir 1.11Elixir v1.11 first release candidate
2 points · Open discussionThat's really strange. In my era I knew a lot of C programmers who specifically advocated this as a "better way to do objects" than C++. Even some who in a pinch implemented their own v-tables, freely admitting that occasionally copping an idea from C++ and turning into an explicit contract is a thing (though this was painful enough that you would rightfully do this rarely).
It's even more strange now, that we have distinctly non-OO languages that explicitly use the first-parameter-is-struct pattern, e.g:
struct definition: https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/blob/v1.10.4/lib/elixi...
and functions: https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/Date.html#functions
In Why is OOP still so widely spread?Argh. Odd statements about "Erlang was implemented in Prolog, therefore, it's an FP language" aside, I was interested to read more on Elixir's meta-programming, and was assured that this code was a great example[1]. But there was no further discussion, just a Github link.
For anyone else wondering the same, the Elixir docs give more insight into quote/unquote[2]...
...but I'm still unsure as to why the Unicode code uses it. Most of the time it's unquoting byte_size - but why does what looks like a function call need to be unquoted?
It looks like it's defining the same function with different pattern matching clauses using it, e.g.,
for codepoint <- cluster["CR"] ++ cluster["LF"] ++ cluster["Control"] do
def next_grapheme_size(<<unquote(codepoint), rest::binary>>) do
{unquote(byte_size(codepoint)), rest}
end
end
Would d
Read the rest
efine next_grapheme_size with an arg pattern that matches each code point, effectively creating a pattern match switch without boilerplating it? I think? Keen to hear from someone who knows Elixir.
But yeah, some more detail on a) what it's doing and b) why it's awesome would've been nice.
[1]: https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/blob/0d32ea6bc4bcbd626...
[2]: https://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/meta/quote-and-unquo...
It's not async by default. It's concurrent. In order to get async, you have to do a ton of wrapping, e.g. https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/blob/v1.9.4/lib/elixir...
In BeOS: The Alternate Universe's Mac OS X