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Add to SafariWhen comparing Elixir vs Crystal, the Slant community recommends Elixir for most people. In the question“What are the best server side programming languages?” Elixir is ranked 4th while Crystal is ranked 24th. The most important reason people chose Elixir is:
Leverages the existing Erlang BEAM VM
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Great for concurrency
Leverages the existing Erlang BEAM VM
Pro Great getting started tutorials
The tutorials are very clear and concise (even for a person not used to functional programming). Plus they are also very mobile friendly.
Pro Powerful metaprogramming
Write code that writes code with Elixir macros. Macros make metaprogramming possible and define the language itself.
Pro Full access to Erlang functions
You can call Erlang functions directly without any overhead: https://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/erlang-libraries.html
Pro Scalability
Elixir programming is ideal for applications that have many users or are actively growing their audience. Elixir can easily cope with much traffic without extra costs for additional servers.
More details can be found here.
Pro Great as a first functional programming language!
Pro Great documentation
Elixir's documentation is very good. It covers everything and always helps solving any problem you may have. It's also always available from the terminal.
Pro Syntax is similar to Ruby, making it familiar for people used to OOP
All of the benefits of Erlang; without as steep a learning curve of prolog based syntax. Elixir is heavily inspired by Ruby's syntax which many people love.
Pro Easy to download libraries
Comes with built in build tool called "mix". This will automatically download libraries and put them in the scope of the application when you add them to the "deps" function and run mix deps.get
Pro Elegant syntax as Ruby
Pro Fast performance
Pro Has co-routine
Pro Compiles to native binary
Cons
Con Deployment is still not as easy as it should be
Con Some design choices may seem strange
Some design choices could have been a little more appealing, for example: using "do...end" comes natural in Ruby for blocks but Elixir uses them for everything and it looks pretty weird:
Enum.map [1, 2, 3], fn(x) -> x * 2 end
or
receive do
{:hello, msg} -> msg
{:world, msg} -> "won't match"
end
Con Aruguably no better than a meme language
The elitest attitudes in the community are unwarrented. Not recommendable for production use. Poor error messages, odd compiler errors, poorly documented behavior, etc..
Con Small community
In regards to its age and already past 1.0, the community is still too small.
![[deleted]](https://avatars.slant.co/identicons/50/9a21b212-6573-4827-9b03-c333d534684d)
Con Not cross-platform
No official Windows support.
Con A language only Ruby fans can love
Ruby-ish language.
Con Slow compilation
Con No parallelism (yet)
Not actual anymore.
