| ▲ | mackross 2 hours ago | |
I’m a huge elixir fan, but imho it doesn’t solve durable execution out of the box which is a major problem that often gets swept under the rug by BEAM fanboys. Because ETS and supervision trees don’t play well with deployment via restart, you’ve got to write some level of execution state to relational database or files. You can choose persistent ETS, mnesia, etc, (which have their own tradeoffs and come with some kind of gnarley data-loss scenarios in deep documentation). But, whatever you choose, in my experience you will need to spend a fair amount of time considering how your processes are going to survive restarts. Alternatively, Oban is nice, but it’s a heavy layer that makes control flow more complex to follow. And, yes you can roll your own hot code deploy and run in persistent VMs/bare metal and be a true BEAM native, but it’s not easy out of the box and comes with its own set of foot guns. If I’m missing something, I would love for someone to explain to me how to do things better, as I find this to be a big pain point whenever I pick up elixir. I want to use the beautiful primitives, but I feel I’m always fighting durable execution in the event of a server restart. I wish a temporal.io client or something with similar guarantees was baked into the lang/frameworks. | ||
| ▲ | veunes 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | |
Spot on. BEAM is great at surviving process crashes, but if the whole cluster goes down or you redeploy, that in-memory state evaporates. It's not magic. For agents that might hang around for days, pure Elixir isn't enough, you still need a persistence layer. The ecosystem is catching up (Oban Pro, FLAME), but in reality, we're still building hybrids: fast actors for active chats and a good old DB for history and long-running processes | ||
| ▲ | indiekitai 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | |
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