Thank you, I really, really appreciate the thoughtful answer.
I've written APIs in Rust, they were performant but the dev experience is needlessly painful, even after years of experience using the language. I'm now using Rails for a major user-facing project, and while the dev experience is all sunshine and flowers, I can't shake the feeling that every line I write is instant tech debt. Refactoring the simplest Rails-favoured Ruby code is a thousand times more painful than refactoring even the most sophisticated system in Rust. I yearn for some kind of sensible mid-point.
Elixir seems extremely neat, but I've been blocked from seriously exploring it by (a) a sense that it may not be more any more performant than Ruby, so why give up the convenience of the latter, and (b) not having seen any obvious improvement on Ruby's hostility to gradual typing / overuse of runtime metaprogramming, which is by far my biggest pain point. I'm chuffed to hear that the performance is indeed better, that the magic in Phoenix happens at compile time, and that gradual types are being taken seriously by the language leadership.
I've written APIs in Rust, they were performant but the dev experience is needlessly painful, even after years of experience using the language. I'm now using Rails for a major user-facing project, and while the dev experience is all sunshine and flowers, I can't shake the feeling that every line I write is instant tech debt. Refactoring the simplest Rails-favoured Ruby code is a thousand times more painful than refactoring even the most sophisticated system in Rust. I yearn for some kind of sensible mid-point.
Elixir seems extremely neat, but I've been blocked from seriously exploring it by (a) a sense that it may not be more any more performant than Ruby, so why give up the convenience of the latter, and (b) not having seen any obvious improvement on Ruby's hostility to gradual typing / overuse of runtime metaprogramming, which is by far my biggest pain point. I'm chuffed to hear that the performance is indeed better, that the magic in Phoenix happens at compile time, and that gradual types are being taken seriously by the language leadership.
I guess I'll have to take Phoenix for a spin.