Elixir is a fantastic choice for building a fast, scalable, and resilient server that is a joy to develop and maintain. Here’s why.

• Failures are isolated in Elixir applications. An uncaught exception in Node could and often would crash the entire application.

• Elixir lets code execute in parallel. Node applications execute code on a first-come-first-serve basis.

• Elixir’s process isolation makes it easy to find slow, or leaky code. It’s been my experience that it’s next to impossible to track down memory leaks, and CPU hogs in a Node app.

• Erlang/Elixir applications come with a built-in graphical debugger. Debugging Node applications in production is very hard and potentially risky.

• Erlang’s Observer gives you a ton of information about every process in your system. Node doesn’t expose nearly as much information about the running application and runtime.

• Logging is built into Erlang and Elixir’s core. Serious logging is an afterthought in Node applications.

• Elixir is 10 years old, and Erlang is 35 years old.

• Elixir is fast. Simple Phoenix requests are measured in nanoseconds, not milliseconds like Node.

• Elixir is scalable.
  • “The Road to 2 Million WebSocket Connections in Phoenix”
  • “How Discord Scaled Elixir to 5,000,000 Concurrent Users”
  • “Why WhatsApp Only Needs 50 Engineers for Its 900M Users”

• There is a community focus on building distributed systems.

• The Elixir documentation is extensive and extremely high quality.

• Elixir’s Phoenix/LiveView framework lets you quickly build real-time web applications. Building a Phoenix application is much faster than building a similar React application.

• Telemetry is a metrics library built into the Elixir core.

Elixir does have a few downsides. Here they are.

• Elixir and Erlang are smaller communities and ecosystems than Node.

• It’s a new language and ecosystem to learn.

• It’s different than our other stacks. There’s value in consistency.

• The backend language would (potentially) be different than the frontend language.