GemStone/S vs Elixir
When comparing GemStone/S vs Elixir, the Slant community recommends Elixir for most people. In the question“What are the best server side programming languages?” Elixir is ranked 4th while GemStone/S is ranked 28th. The most important reason people chose Elixir is:
Leverages the existing Erlang BEAM VM
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Scalable object-oriented persistence
Gemstone/S is a persistent object environment, capable of high performance database tasks.
Pro Free version even for commercial use
GemStone/S has very capable licenses for no cost that allow businesses to use it commercially for no cost.
Pro Extreme robustness, performance and flexibility
This product has a long line of evolution, guaranteeing all these qualities
Pro Smalltalk
Smalltalk is one of the most productive environments, which makes the hard things easy and the difficult, practical.
Pro Tightly related to Pharo Smalltalk
You can develop your Smalltalk projects on friendly Pharo and run them on the rock solid GemStone environment.
Pro Live debugging production errors
Never debug from textual traces anymore: do live debugging of saved stack traces for production errors
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
Cons
Con Vendor lock-in
The environment is unique and you easily become very dependent on what it has to offer, while there is no alternative vendor to switch to.
Con The runtime environment is essentially free, but not open source.
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