Introduced in 2012, Elixir is a general-purpose language used to create scalable, maintainable applications. Despite its relative youth, it has already gained enormous popularity and widespread appeal. Many developers are eager to learn and leverage the language.
Given its numerous applications and reputation as a top language, Elixir development services are in high demand.
Our Elixir Development Services
Elixir Web Development
Elixir, which was initially created as an alternative to Ruby, is routinely applied to backend web development. At BairesDev, we have extensive experience working with Elixir in conjunction with additional web development tools and languages to build robust websites and web applications.
Elixir Consulting
We have plenty of experience offering guidance and support to assist you with your next Elixir consulting project, whether you need help planning, conceptualizing, or otherwise building your product.
Elixir Maintenance & Support
Need help with migration? Looking for maintenance to keep your applications up to date? BairesDev has unique solutions and expertise in these areas.
Phoenix Web Framework Development
Phoenix is the main Elixir framework, and it is useful for building robust, interactive, scalable, and reliable websites and web applications. Our developers will use Phoenix with Elixir to deliver high-quality results.
Elixir APIs & Microservices
Using Phoenix, our developers can create APIs for your Elixir projects, enabling you to build stronger applications.
Why Partner With BairesDev as Your Elixir Development Company
Experience
Elixir is a young language, and not all developers have extensive experience working with it and turning around quality projects leveraging Elixir. But BairesDev hires the best of the best, ensuring that any Elixir developer we bring onto your team is well-versed in the ins and outs of the language.
Efficiency
Our professionals work quickly and efficiently, bringing your projects to fruition fast — all while producing high-quality results, so you can rest assured you will have time for your core business while we handle your complex tech needs.
Scalability
Elixir is a highly scalable language, and given our developers’ vast expertise in this and other tech tools, we will help you scale your projects and your entire business. We will also provide you with the support you need to help you grow.
What is Elixir?
Elixir is a prominent general-purpose programming language. Businesses use Elixir for developing web-based applications and APIs. Elixir is a dynamically typed language and follows duck typing methodology (the object’s properties define what it can do, rather than the class it inherits).
It supports many data types, including Boolean, floats, integers, tuples, strings, and lists, and it’s one of the most reliable programming languages out there. It made its debut in 2011 and is licensed under Apache License 2.0. Jose Valim, Elixir’s creator, designed it on top of BEAM, also known as Erlang Virtual Machine (Erlang VM).
Advantages of Elixir
Elixir is a very functional and robust programming language. It has many attributes in common with both Erlang and Ruby. It combines Ruby’s effectiveness and fault tolerance with Erlang’s runtime characteristics to create low-latency web and software programs and systems.
Fault-tolerance
Elixir is built on Erlang, a language that has unmatched reliability and fault tolerance. Through Elixir, you can create apps and systems that can automatically handle runtime errors with utmost precision and recover without human intervention.
Erlang VM isolates the dysfunctional modules automatically, which prevents the entire system from going down during failure. You can also set up redundancies. For example, you can design the system so that some data may still be accessible through the cache even if the database is unavailable.
Concurrency
One of the best features of Elixir is concurrency. i.e., its ability to execute multiple tasks at the same time. The concurrency in Elixir is maintained through Actors. Actors are single-threaded processes (contained) that can deliver and receive messages among themselves. The Actors share no memory and communicate through asynchronous message passing.
Speed
This programming language is very fast. It creates smaller file spaces and also improves the speed of APIs. It compiles into BEAM bytecode and gets all the speed benefits of Erlang without the performance issues.
Many developers consider Elixir to be faster than Ruby and NodeJS, making it highly suitable for application development and server design.
Clear syntax
One of the most important benefits of Elixir is the availability of easy code sets. Learning and using Elixir is very easy. It boasts clear syntax rules, and the final code is highly readable. The language itself has many qualities, such as being functional, distributed, and process-oriented.
Scalability
Elixir is known for its traffic management. Erlang’s BEAM makes full use of its CPUs and distributed hardware. You can also effectively use Multi-core CPUs via Elixir.
Elixir’s Garbage collector (GC) is also very smart. Instead of running GC for cleanup for all processes, Elixir destroys small processes when their function is completed. This improves the overall performance of the system as GC never overloads it.
Hundreds of companies around the world use Elixir for their backend requirements. Even though it first appeared in 2011 and is considered a new language, many popular companies such as Moz, Pinterest, IBM, Pepsico, Whatsapp, and Bet365 use it. Anyone interested in working for these companies or working with a similar tech stack should definitely invest time in learning this language.
Top Elixir frameworks
Some of the most popular Elixir frameworks are:
Phoenix
It’s a web development framework used to create low latency distributed systems. Phoenix uses a model-view-controller (MVC) architecture. It has features such as Real-Time LiveView and built-in channels for ease of development. Through its dashboards, you can easily maintain code, reduce cognitive load, and empower highly agile and scalable web applications and servers.
Nerves
Nerves is a popular Elixir framework for embedded software development. It’s a reliable platform that provides the infrastructure and services to create, deploy, and secure IoT apps and devices. In addition, it supports Lean systems which simplifies maintenance.
Sugar
Sugar is an open-source modular framework for Elixir projects. It can build a broad set of classes that you can use for different platforms such as .NET and Cocoa. It allows effective code sharing between clients and promises features such as speed and ease of development.
Hedwig
Hedwig is a communication framework for Elixir. You can design an OTP application through it or use it as a dependency for an OTP application. Hedwig also supports Elixir in building robust APIs. It is shipped with the console adapter – Hedwig:
Kitto
Kitto is an open-source framework for Elixir through which you can design interactive dashboards. It comprises a database-agnostic data-access layer that can be used to map any database into a dashboard. It can also be used to port applications to different databases.
You can pass the business declaratively or through JS fragments on the client side. The Kitto framework enables you to create diverse, rich Internet applications.
Applications of Elixir in the Tech Industry
Some of the most notable areas where businesses use Elixir include the following.
Chat applications
Elixir’s abilities such as workload management, traffic distribution, and concurrency make it a popular choice for chat app development. In addition, Elixir can clean/trim the company’s enterprise code and speed up performance for push notification and routing. Two major companies that use Elixir in telecommunications are Whatsapp and WeChat.
IoT services
Nerves is an infrastructure development platform based on Elixir that you can use for designing IoT-related services. Elixir also comes with higher-order functions (availability, reliability, scalability) and pattern matching that are highly useful for embedded, web server-based development.
Blockchain
Many businesses use Elixir to develop decentralized blockchain apps due to its attributes, such as concurrency and scalability. Elixir also prevents latency and provides maximum throughput. Features like these ensure stability and synchronization for any ledger, which is highly required in blockchain development.
Gaming
Many developers use Elixir for their game’s backend. You can build your logic in BEAM and use C for port interaction/communication. This way, you can build a high-performance game with Elixir features.
