> copy and paste a higher-level construct like an Agent or Genserver and add the 1 line of code to this root supervisor that was just a file auto-generated in your project. But that'll get you a) introduced to the actor model and b) thinking about messaging while c) not ever worrying about or messing up concurrency.
Isn't it well known that GenServers can become severe bottlenecks unless you know the inner workings of everything to the point where you're an expert?
I'm not an Elixir expert or even used a GenServer in practice but I remember reading some warnings about using GenServers around performance because they can only handle 1 request at a time and it's super easy to bring down your whole system if you don't know what you're doing.
This blog post explains how that happens: https://www.cogini.com/blog/avoiding-genserver-bottlenecks/
And I remember seeing a lot of forum posts around the dangers of using GenServers (unless you know what you're doing).
It's not really as easy as just copy / pasting something, adding 1 line and you're done. You need to put in serious time and effort to understand the intricacies of a very complex system (BEAM, OTP) if you plan to leave the world of only caring about local function execution.
And as that blog post mentions, it recommends using ETS but Google says ETS isn't distributed. So now suddenly you're stuck only being able to work with 1 machine. This is a bit more limiting than using Python or Ruby and deciding to share your state in Redis. This really does typically require adding a few lines of code and now your state is saved in an external service and now you're free to scale to as many web servers you want until Redis becomes a bottleneck (which it likely never will). You can also freely restart your web servers without losing what's in Redis.
I know you can do distributed state in Elixir too, but it doesn't seem as easy as it is in other languages. And it's especially more complicated / less pragmatic than other tech stacks because almost every other tech stack all use the same tools to share external state so it's a super documented and well thought out problem.
Isn't it well known that GenServers can become severe bottlenecks unless you know the inner workings of everything to the point where you're an expert?
I'm not an Elixir expert or even used a GenServer in practice but I remember reading some warnings about using GenServers around performance because they can only handle 1 request at a time and it's super easy to bring down your whole system if you don't know what you're doing.
This blog post explains how that happens: https://www.cogini.com/blog/avoiding-genserver-bottlenecks/
And I remember seeing a lot of forum posts around the dangers of using GenServers (unless you know what you're doing).
It's not really as easy as just copy / pasting something, adding 1 line and you're done. You need to put in serious time and effort to understand the intricacies of a very complex system (BEAM, OTP) if you plan to leave the world of only caring about local function execution.
And as that blog post mentions, it recommends using ETS but Google says ETS isn't distributed. So now suddenly you're stuck only being able to work with 1 machine. This is a bit more limiting than using Python or Ruby and deciding to share your state in Redis. This really does typically require adding a few lines of code and now your state is saved in an external service and now you're free to scale to as many web servers you want until Redis becomes a bottleneck (which it likely never will). You can also freely restart your web servers without losing what's in Redis.
I know you can do distributed state in Elixir too, but it doesn't seem as easy as it is in other languages. And it's especially more complicated / less pragmatic than other tech stacks because almost every other tech stack all use the same tools to share external state so it's a super documented and well thought out problem.