I went ahead and announced the core dates for Goatmire Elixir 2026.

30th of Sep - 2nd of Oct. This year. Varberg, Sweden.

While we still need to pin down a lot of details I went ahead and shared some plans on my blog. Mostly to let you all know that you probably want to consider showing up for more than just those 3 days.

The response to this announcement has been heartwarming and reassuring. I'm very excited to be doing a second one. CFTs, volunteering and all details like that will show up in the coming weeks and months. Lots to do. The plans we are conspiring on already has me vibrating.

The full type system coverage

Elixir is doing RCs (release candidates) for v1.20 right now. They announced the plans for 1.20 in on the blog. A whole lot of type system is the big thing in this version and the goal is type inference of all constructs. I thought this described the system well:

"Elixir’s type system includes the dynamic() type, which can be used when the type of a variable or expression is checked at runtime. In the absence of dynamic(), Elixir’s type system behaves as a static one"

Type annotations are not in this version. You should still hurry to grab the RC, run your app under it and fix any problems. I did this for NervesHub yesterday. It resulted in two PRs. One was the basic stuff. I'm not sure if it is the type system work, but Elixir certainly detects unused require a lot better now. Then I hit some wild type errors from a combination of phoenix_html, mjml_eex and our NervesHub code. I raised it with the Elixir folks and Steffen Deusch showed up with an update for phoenix_html that solved all ours problems. Apparently you will get false positives there and José Valim noted that the type system bug will be fixed in a couple of months so that stops happening at all.

If you do this type of stuff ahead of time you clear the decks and make your transition to the released version clean. You also help the ecosystem find any issues with the upcoming version of the language.

So much like you should get ready for Goatmire, mark the date in the calendar, start planning your outfit. You should grab the RC and make sure you are ready. It might just find some mistakes. Lots of people have mentioned it finding unused or unreachable code.

Thank you for reading. I appreciate it.