LPlpil·Oct 8, 2024
In the early days of Elixir what you are proposing here was popular[1], but over time the community largely decided it wasn't beneficial and I rarely see it any more.
[1]: https://github.com/sasa1977/exactor
In Gleam Is Pragmaticsasa1977
exactor
Elixir2013–2024
sasa1977 / exactor
exactor
Helpers for simpler implementation of GenServer based processes
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7Mentions
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Helpers for simpler implementation of GenServer based processes
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> There are libraries that do this, like https://github.com/sasa1977/exactor At the very top of the Extractor readme: > I don't maintain this project anymore. In hindsight, I…
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HN mentions by year7 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2013-05-31 17:21:07 UTC to 2024-10-08 14:19:23 UTC.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2013 | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2014 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
What Hacker News says
7 sources> Maybe one of the next BEAM languages will handle that automatically for us.
It not being automatic is a feature as that pattern is only what you want in the trivial case, but in real programs you are going to want more control.
In early Elixir there was a relatively popular macro library[1] that offered what you ask for (see code example below) but as Elixir matured and started being used in more than toy projects it was largely abandoned.
defmodule Calculator do
use ExActor.GenServer
defstart start_link, do: initial_state(0)
defcast inc(x), state: state, do: new_state(state + x)
defcast dec(x), state: state, do: new_state(state - x)
defcall get, state: state, do: reply(state)
defcast stop, do: stop_server(:normal)
end
[1]: https://github.com/sasa1977/exactor
In Exploring Gleam, a type-safe language on the BEAM> There are libraries that do this, like https://github.com/sasa1977/exactor
At the very top of the Extractor readme:
> I don't maintain this project anymore. In hindsight, I don't think it was a good idea in the first place. I haven't been using ExActor myself for years, and I recommend sticking with regular GenServer instead :-)
This both confirms what you said about the Elixir community shying away from macro magic, and makes this library a very bad idea to use in new projects, imo.
In A Brief Guide to OTP in ElixirThere are libraries that do this, like https://github.com/sasa1977/exactor but the Elixir community nowadays seems more conservative about macro "magic" than it was a few years ago. Sasa has written an entire book about OTP and if he doesn't recommend using his own library I wouldn't argue with him, but I haven't written a Genserver myself in years despite writing Elixir for a living the past 3.5 years. If you are going to learn how they work though, it makes sense to stick to how Erlang actually implements them.
In A Brief Guide to OTP in ElixirI think I came off snarkier than I intended to above, thank you for reading that gracefully.
> I still didn't run into problems with the AR approach. Maybe it's because all of my projects were medium or small sized. I found AR to be perfect for them to the point that I want to disguise Ecto as AR using Ecto.Rut.
Perhaps its a stylistic thing, but recent versions of Ecto feel quite natural to me. I frequently use Ecto without a database by using it for embedded schemas (which I don't embed)—they're basically just structs that I can use with changesets a little more cleanly.
As someone else noted, you don't have to use changesets for the happy path interactions like simple inserts. It really just comes down to whether you can live with the Repo as the first thing you type instead of the schema.
> This sounds interesting but I fail to unders
Read the rest
tand what you mean. Would you mind explaining or posting a link? Thanks.
Rails teaches us to look at the model as the primary point of business logic. In my view this is putting the cart before the horse. By putting the Model (big M, not little m) we limit our thinking around abstractions to what we can represent structurally in the database. A well-designed, thought-out application model (little m, not big M) encompasses much more than database tables. With AR, even if you try to create behaviors on fat models, ultimately the only vocabulary you have to work with are those nouns the database allows you.
Ecto does something subtle but important: it demotes your data schema to just that—data. Behavior is modelled in the messages you pass between processes, which is why you see so many people in the elixir community jumping into architectural techniques like eventsourcing. While things like Ecto.Rut add some conveniences, they also encourage promotion of the data to the central artifact of the system. After building Rails applications from small to very large over 10 years, I can say for my part I want to stay as far away from that as possible. Its convenient until its not, and when you can start to feel the pain of it, its very difficult to unwind its effects throughout your system.
re: agents, maybe what you're looking for is ExActor: https://github.com/sasa1977/exactor
Worth noting, especially if you're in the first 12-18 months of using Elixir: OTP is incredible, but it takes time to wrap your head around all its pieces. I usually recommend new users coming from an MVC framework just try to muddle along using Phoenix as they would Rails until they start getting comfortable with things like supervision trees and GenServers... and then the fun really starts. All the rest of it, like Ecto's hands-off approach to the database, really starts to make sense around that time.
I'd like to share some solutions. This is a compact notation for Elixir using the capture operator `&` and importing all Enum functions:
import Enum
[1,2,3,4] \
|> filter(& rem(&1,2) == 0 ) \
|> map(& &1*&1) \
|> reduce(0, & &1 + &2)
Also ExActor (https://github.com/sasa1977/exactor) library does exactly what you want: generates "standard double" GenServer functions and significantly reduces GenServer boilerplate.
I've discovered that it's significantly easier for me to get in the flow state of mind while programming in Elixir. Comfortable and powerful. Definitely a worthwhile investment of time and effort.
In Phoenix 1.3 is pure love for API developmentIts all about the macros, man. If you are familiar with Erlang and gen_server, then perhaps looking at the examples in the readme of Exactor (https://github.com/sasa1977/exactor) will be enlightening to you. It presents a very straightforward DSL for defining gen_servers plus function wrappers in a very small amount of code with little boilerplate and repetition. There are other great libraries that make excellent use of macros, I just think this one makes this point really well.
In A Week with Elixir