Elixir is not owned by Big Tech

Underjord is a tiny, wholesome team doing Elixir consulting and contract work. If you like the writing you should really try the code. See our services for more information.

We all have varying degrees of exposure to Big Tech. Some of it seems fine, stable and can be relied on. Some of it feels like shifting sand under your feet. React seems to move a lot on whims, I don’t envy tracking that. Go seems like it might be fairly stable? With the current geo-political climate I don’t find massive corporations to be a guarantee for stability. People may be getting fired even though they chose IBM. The world is wild right now.

There are programming languages that came up in the increasingly olden times before market penetration required corporate sponsorship. PHP, Python and Ruby all seemed to just take shape in the tech world as some kind of grassroots thing with a wide variety of users as stakeholders. That seems incredibly hard to do now and we have languages like Rust, Go, TypeScript and Swift that are supported by corporate entities until they achieve flight and usually beyond that. Mozilla is not a FAANG level megacorp but they certainly helped Rust take flight and now I hear Rust is beloved in Amazon and Microsoft.

There are still exceptions that come up. I think Zig is mostly community-driven and seems to have some traction. Not Rust levels of traction but definitely relevance. And my ecosystem of preference, Elixir, seemed to boost out of the Ruby world when Ruby was somewhat losing steam but still had a lot of momentum built up. It built on the power and reputation of Erlang combined with the niceties of Ruby and found some traction.

Elixir is controlled by the Elixir core team. If there is a corporate entity behind the core team it is Dashbit that employs a few of them and contributes massively to the wider Elixir ecosystem with Nx, Livebook and tons of various libraries. Dashbit is a small consultancy shop. They essentially offer high-profile Elixir developers as a subscription service. PR review, big picture assistance, emergency help. And their commercial offerings fund significant developer time for the Elixir ecosystem.

Originally Elixir was developed at a company, Plataformatec. Hardly a massive corporation and it was acqui-hired by Nubank in a deal which left José Valim with the rights to Elixir. So we essentially have a BDFL model (benevolent dictator for life) which seems to serve the language well.

There is a wide variety of companies using Elixir but none of them have massive input or hold particularly much sway over the development of the language. Most of the development of the ecosystem happen thanks to the efforts of lots of volunteers. Some are supported, funded or helped by the companies they work at. Some are not. Some run their own business and make time for community work (hello!).

The biggest single corporation that has a massive impact on Elixir is Ericsson. Through Erlang/OTP. They fund the development of the foundations of the ecosystem of the BEAM virtual machine and all related parts. They get contributions from other large users, such as Meta. I do not like Meta as a company but the WhatsApp part of Meta that I’ve met, the people who work on the Erlang parts, have been thoroughly decent individuals and they clearly contribute back. If Ericsson stopped development of Erlang it would be a problem for Elixir. Thankfully the telecom giant actively uses Erlang and continues to fund and maintain the team.

There is also the Erlang Ecosystem Foundation that operates a kind of unifying entity for BEAM languages and related efforts. It provides a way to perform common work across Erlang, Elixir and Gleam for example where there might not have been an obvious way to handle funding previously. It seems to work okay, it is not particularly loud or in-your-face day-to-day as a user of the ecosystem. Right now there is a lot of focus on the increasing compliance burden for languages to stay relevant. So SBOM, the recent EU CRA, similar demands in the US.

Beyond the core language there are a bundle of companies that have contributed or are currently contributing significantly to Elixir as an ecosystem. I spend a lot of time in the Nerves/IoT parts of the ecosystem and SmartRent who employ the creator of Nerves and use Nerves heavily in products also contribute a lot back into the ecosystem. Tons of libraries as well as development on NervesHub and experiences from their production environments continuously improving Nerves itself.

For many years DockYard employed Chris McCord to work on Phoenix, that also lead to LiveView. They also develop various other projects for the community. These days Chris works at Fly who similarly fund a lot of his work on Phoenix and LiveView.

Membrane the media framework is entirely developed by Software Mansion, a consultancy in Poland who specialize in streaming media. Ash Framework is largely supported and funded by Alembic, a consultancy based out of Australia. You’ll find the name of some consultancy or other small company on a lot of important libraries in the Elixir space as they often pick up the maintenance of things they depend on.

This state of affairs is not a rocketship recipe. It is a steady-going concern and an awesome ecosystem to live in where you don’t have to worry about anything very drastic happening because Elixir Megacorp failed to hit Q3 targets. If you are looking for an ecosystem which has limited exposure to megacorps but is still production-grade, productive and satisfying I think you might like Elixir.

The model certainly has challenges, especially around decision-making and concerted efforts. I think it is preferable to a lot of other variants. And I’m not sure you can do the same thing today. It seems incredibly hard to establish a new language and get relevant traction. Gleam seems to be on the trajectory which is awesome. I hope we see more as well. I don’t think Rust is the most effective way to solve all problems and I definitely don’t want a future entirely built in TypeScript.

Are there languages I’m overlooking that are also recent and have had success? Are you comfortable with the megacorp languages? I’d be curious to hear your thoughts. You can reach me in the fediverse as @lawik@fosstodon.org or email lars@underjord.io.

Underjord is a 4 people team doing Elixir consulting and contract work. If you like the writing you should really try the code. See our services for more information.

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