If anyone is on the fence on learning Elixir / Phoenix (Elixir's most popular web framework library) please do yourself a favor and give it a shot. If you're on a time crunch and want the best bang for your buck on "why bother learning yet another language to write web apps in?" then watch this talk called "The Soul of Erlang and Elixir": <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvBT4XBdoUE" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvBT4XBdoUE</a><p>I'm not affiliated with the language but I just want to throw out that I've been around since the Geocities era as a web developer and I haven't seen a tech stack or platform this well thought out and so in tune with what makes developing (and testing!) modern web applications an absolute joy. There's really something special here. I see myself sticking with it for 10+ years with 0 regrets.<p>The best part about it is everything is ready today (and was before 1.9 too btw).
Fantastic. Congratulations to the Elixir team!<p>Something striking from the release announcement:<p>> As mentioned earlier, releases was the last planned feature for Elixir. We don’t have any major user-facing feature in the works nor planned.<p>Part of me is a little alarmed—no one wants a language to stagnate. José makes it clear that this doesn't mean it's the last version:<p>> Of course, it does not mean that v1.9 is the last Elixir version. We will continue releasing shipping new releases every 6 months with enhancements, bug fixes and improvements.<p>Elixir is remarkably extensible. When I was first getting acquainted with the language finding macros with all the expressive ability of a LISP blew my mind. Making powerful macros a core part of the language meant that the language could grow. That in my mind is the most important part of any language's long-term viability.<p>Fantastic work all who contributed. Thank you for making a fast, functional, and fun language to work with!
This is great news! The deployment story has progressively improved since I started using Elixir in 2016, but the best way is to just have _one_ community blessed system.<p>Distillery has helped a lot for sure, so it's nice that it's basically been rolled into the base elixir distro.
One part of releasing Elixir applications I never found a definite answer was how closely the build environment has to match the final environment where the release is deployed. The Erlang runtime is bundled with a release, and this part is platform-dependent as far as I understand.<p>If I'm writing an application that I'll only deploy myself I can of course match the environments exactly. But what about if I wanted to distribute an Elixir application to end users that might install it on all kinds of different operating systems and distributions? Do I have to build a release for OS/architecture combinations like Linux/64bit, Windows/32bit and similar? Or do I have to match each Linux distribution and windows version exactly? That would make it rather impractical to use Elixir to write software you give to other people, and don't deploy yourself.<p>Of course when I looked at this Distillery was the standard way to deploy, but it doesn't look like this part is any different with Elixir Releases.
Congratulations! Notably, they mention switch to Cirrus CI, because it supports FreeBSD also. I wish Travis[1], Appveyor[2], and Azure Pipelines supported it too.<p>[1] <a href="https://travis-ci.community/t/freebsd-vms-support/2125" rel="nofollow">https://travis-ci.community/t/freebsd-vms-support/2125</a><p>[2] <a href="https://github.com/appveyor/ci/issues/2844" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/appveyor/ci/issues/2844</a>
I know nothing about Elixir/erlang besides following installs for apps. I have used it, installed via ASDF on my Raspberry pi since dependencies weren't up to date.<p>Can anyone provide a good place to start on where to get started with Elixir?<p>I tend to learn by working on stuff and not just reading etc, maybe a step by step in elixir? I am going into the literature now as well<p>Thanks in advance for any help!
Sorry if this is a dumb question, but how do releases fit into the deployment story with containers so prevalent these days? (As in why is this a benefit when you can just package code into a single container to ship it?) Is it that it works with hot code updates? Or it’s a more Erlang-sanctioned way of deploying code?
As someone using Elixir full time for a couple years now, I'm very happy to see releases become first class parts of the language. Is there a migration guide for those of us using distillery currently? And if we're happy with our distillery setup, what are the advantages of moving to native 1.9 releases?
They're moving config from each individual umbrella application to the root of the umbrella. Gotta love how the team keeps things simple and opinionated. These little choices add up to quite the developer experience.
As someone who's new to web dev, is there any incentives in going for Elixir than using those established languages(i.e. Node, Ruby)? Any book/sources recommendations?
quite new to elixir ( still haven't deployed anything to prod ).<p>interested to know, how the releases feture going to affect the way we deploy elixir/phonenix apps in production ?