What is Elixir written in?
What Elixir is used for
Elixir brings a modern, productive syntax to the battle-tested Erlang VM, making it a strong choice for highly concurrent, fault-tolerant web and real-time systems. The Phoenix framework is its flagship.
Notable software: Discord's real-time messaging infrastructure and many chat, IoT, and streaming back-ends.
Quick Facts
- Designed by
- José Valim
- First released
- 2012
- Typing
- dynamic
- License
- Apache Software License 2.0
- Filename extension
- .ex, .exs
- Website
- elixir-lang.org
About Elixir
Elixir is a programming language. It is a dynamically typed and garbage-collected language that compiles to bytecode that runs on a virtual machine. It supports functional and concurrent programming. Compiling to bytecode for a virtual machine is the same model the JVM and .NET use: the VM, not the CPU, interprets or JIT-compiles the bytecode.
Elixir first appeared in 2012 and was designed by José Valim. Elixir keeps a steady, moderate following today.
How Elixir is implemented
In the Language Lineage dataset, Elixir is self-hosting, so its own compiler is written in Elixir itself, its runtime is implemented in BEAM VM and Erlang, and its toolchain was bootstrapped from Erlang. Reaching self-hosting, where a language is mature enough to compile itself, is a milestone that proves the language can handle a large, real-world program.
Elixir in the language family tree
Elixir drew on ideas from Scheme, Ruby, Erlang, and Python.
Sources: Wikipedia · Wikidata · Official site
Frequently Asked Questions
Evidence Sources
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elixir_(programming_language)
- https://elixir-lang.org/
- https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2013/08/08/elixir-design-goals/
- https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir
- Elixir on Wikidata (Q5362035)