Elixir-lang.org has a new design
68 points
2 hours ago
| 17 comments
| elixir-lang.org
| HN
hybridcivic182
18 minutes ago
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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
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999900000999
34 minutes ago
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Elixir is such an elegant language.

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

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pluralmonad
24 minutes ago
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Such a delight to use and the core team seems to always make the right decision.
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loloquwowndueo
41 minutes ago
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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.

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madibo3156
23 minutes ago
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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.
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sph
45 minutes ago
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No mention of AI and LLM in the front page. Life is good.
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eikenberry
4 minutes ago
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They have a Machine Learning section on the front page. Just have to scroll down a bit, under the "Use Elixir for" section.
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Onavo
29 minutes ago
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But I bet the landing page was made with AI assistance.
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sph
6 minutes ago
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reliablereason
26 minutes ago
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It certainly looks like a Claude design to some extent; not all they way however.
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bbg2401
24 minutes ago
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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.

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grahac
1 hour ago
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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!)

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Stromgren
41 minutes ago
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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

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alberth
1 hour ago
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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.

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josevalim
54 minutes ago
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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.

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ch4s3
1 hour ago
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It’s pretty hard to make things like math faster for real world use cases in a bytecode interpreter.
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dmpk2k
1 hour ago
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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.

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jimbokun
1 hour ago
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Java and Javascript run times do really well at that.
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asa400
45 minutes ago
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Looks great! There are some style quirks with cutoff elements in Firefox 152.0.6: https://imgur.com/a/OtnESi7
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binaryturtle
49 minutes ago
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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?)
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allanmacgregor
2 hours ago
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Looks pretty good, I like that they are highlighting the potential uses for elixir.
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losvedir
1 hour ago
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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.
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jomcgi
44 minutes ago
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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

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org3
58 minutes ago
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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

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davidw
1 hour ago
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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.

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jeanlucas
1 hour ago
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Nice! The showcase of companies is really nice
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arikrahman
1 hour ago
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I prefer https://jank-lang.org/ new re-design, and the approach of a more step-wise refinement.
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__float
1 hour ago
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How is this language related to Elixir? Or are you just commenting that another language has a website?
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arikrahman
23 minutes ago
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They had a recent re-design last week.
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zuzululu
35 minutes ago
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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.

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toast0
3 minutes ago
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> 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.

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Starlevel004
55 minutes ago
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Why does it have like 0.1s animations?
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josevalim
46 minutes ago
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Can you clarify which ones? We will be glad to improve them (or feel free to send a PR).
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bbg2401
2 hours ago
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ModernMech
1 hour ago
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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.
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josevalim
1 hour ago
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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

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ModernMech
42 minutes ago
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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.
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ia
13 minutes ago
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I’m tried to understand the motivation for this salty comment and the parent comment. I failed. Then I opened the user’s comment history and most of their comments are like this. ModernMech, please, keep in mind we’re all doing our best. Being passive aggressive on the internet is social pollution. No offense intended, I’m just hoping you reflect a bit next time before you post.
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pests
35 minutes ago
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"Human produces output similar to a machine trained on all human output"
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Pay08
22 minutes ago
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This is how every second website has looked for the past 10 years.
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acedTrex
1 hour ago
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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.
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phplovesong
42 minutes ago
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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?

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pluralmonad
16 minutes ago
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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.
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ch4s3
33 minutes ago
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Have you tried it since the new type system rolled out?
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