What is Elixir?

Introduced in 2012, Elixir is a general-purpose language used to create scalable and maintainable applications. Despite its relative youth, it has already gained enormous popularity and widespread appeal. Many developers are eager to learn and enjoy the language.

Given its numerous applications and reputation as a top language, Elixir development services are highly sought after.

Our Elixir development services

Elixir Web Development

Elixir Consulting

We have a lot of experience offering guidance and support to help you with your next Elixir consulting project, whether you need help planning, conceptualizing or building your product.

Elixir maintenance and support

Phoenix web framework development

Phoenix is ​​the core framework for Elixir and is useful for building robust, interactive, scalable, and reliable websites and web applications. Our developers will use Phoenix with Elixir to provide high-quality results.

Elixir APIs and microservices

Using Phoenix, our developers can create APIs for your Elixir projects, allowing you to build more robust applications.

Why partner with BairesDev as your Elixir development company

Experience

Efficiency

Our professionals work quickly and efficiently, bringing your projects to fruition quickly – all while producing high-quality results, so you can be confident you have time for your core business while we take care of your complex technology needs.

Scalability

Elixir is a highly scalable language, and given our developers' vast experience in this and other technology tools, we will help you scale your projects and your entire business. We'll also provide the support you need to help you grow.

What is Elixir?

Elixir is a prominent general-purpose programming language. Companies use Elixir to develop web-based applications and APIs. Elixir is a dynamically typed language and follows the duck typing methodology (the object's properties define what it can do, rather than the class it inherits).

It supports many data types, including booleans, floats, integers, tuples, strings, and lists, and is one of the most reliable programming languages ​​out there. It made its debut in 2011 and is licensed under the Apache License 2.0. Jose Valim, creator of Elixir, designed it on top of BEAM, also known as Erlang Virtual Machine (Erlang VM).

Advantages of Elixir

Elixir is a very functional and robust programming language. It has many attributes in common with Erlang and Ruby. It combines the power and fault tolerance of Ruby with the runtime characteristics of Erlang to create low-latency web and software programs and systems.

Fault tolerance

Elixir is built on Erlang, a language that has unmatched reliability and fault tolerance. Through Elixir, you can create applications and systems that can automatically handle runtime errors with maximum accuracy and recover without human intervention.

Erlang VM isolates dysfunctional modules automatically, which prevents the entire system from going down during a failure. You can also configure redundancies. For example, you can design the system so that some data can still be accessible through the cache even if the database is unavailable.

Concurrency

One of Elixir's best features is concurrency. that is, your ability to perform multiple tasks at the same time. Concurrency in Elixir is maintained through Actors. Actors are single-threaded (contained) processes that can deliver and receive messages between each other. Actors do not share memory and communicate via asynchronous message passing.

Speed

This programming language is very fast. It creates smaller file spaces and also improves the speed of APIs. It compiles to BEAM bytecode and gets all the speed benefits of Erlang without the performance issues.

Many developers consider Elixir to be faster than Ruby and NodeJS, making it highly suitable for application development and server design.

Clear syntax

One of the most important benefits of Elixir is the availability of easy code sets. Learning and using Elixir is very easy. It has clear syntax rules and the final code is highly readable. The language itself has many qualities, such as being functional, distributed and process-oriented.

Scalability

Elixir is known for its traffic management. Erlang's BEAM makes full use of its CPUs and distributed hardware. You can also use multi-core CPUs effectively via Elixir.

Elixir's garbage collector (GC) is also very smart. Instead of running GC to clean up all processes, Elixir destroys small processes when its function is complete. This improves overall system performance as the GC never overloads it.

Hundreds of companies across the world use Elixir for their backend requirements. Although it first appeared in 2011 and is considered a new language, many popular companies such as Moz, Pinterest, IBM, Pepsico, Whatsapp and Bet365 use it. Anyone interested in working for these companies or working with a similar technology should definitely invest time in learning this language.

Main Elixir Structures

Some of the most popular Elixir frameworks are:

Phoenix

It is a web development framework used to create low-latency distributed systems. Phoenix uses a model-view-controller (MVC) architecture. It has features like Real-Time LiveView and integrated channels to make development easier. Through its dashboards, you can easily maintain code, reduce cognitive load, and power highly agile and scalable applications and web servers.

Nerves

Nerves is a popular Elixir framework for embedded software development. It is a trusted platform that provides infrastructure and services to build, deploy, and secure IoT applications and devices. Additionally, it supports Lean systems that simplify maintenance.

Sugar

Sugar is an open source modular framework for Elixir projects. It can build a wide set of classes that you can use for different platforms like .NET and Cocoa. It allows for effective code sharing between clients and promises features like speed and ease of development.

Hedwig

Hedwig is a communication framework for Elixir. You can design an OTP application through it or use it as a dependency for an OTP application. Hedwig also supports Elixir in building robust APIs. It ships with the console adapter – Hedwig:

Kitto

Kitto is an open source framework for Elixir through which you can create interactive dashboards. It comprises a database-independent data access layer that can be used to map any database into a dashboard. It can also be used to port applications to different databases.

You can pass the deal declaratively or through JS fragments on the client side. The Kitto framework allows you to create diverse and rich Internet applications.

Elixir Applications in the Technology Industry

Some of the most notable areas where companies use Elixir include the following.

Chat Apps

Elixir's abilities like workload management, traffic distribution, and concurrency make it a popular choice for chat app development. Additionally, Elixir can clean/slice enterprise code and accelerate performance for push notifications and routing. Two big companies that use Elixir in telecommunications are Whatsapp and WeChat.

IoT Services

Nerves is an Elixir-based infrastructure development platform that you can use to design IoT-related services. Elixir also comes with higher-order functions (availability, reliability, scalability) and pattern matching that are highly useful for web server-based embedded development.

Blockchain

Many companies use Elixir to develop decentralized blockchain applications due to its attributes such as concurrency and scalability. Elixir also avoids latency and provides maximum throughput. Features like these ensure stability and synchronization for any reason, which is highly necessary in blockchain development.

Games

Many developers use Elixir as the backend of their games. You can build your logic in BEAM and use C for port interaction/communication. This way, you can build a high-performance game with Elixir features.