by jerf | 2025-04-11 19:07:58+00:00
"but why hasn't Erlang/Elixir been able to capture that share?"

Because Erlang has a well-integrated collection of what are by 2025 standards mediocre tools.

There is value to that integration, and I absolutely won't deny that.

However, the state of the art has moved beyond Erlang in a number of ways, and you're taking a pretty big penalty to stick to BEAM on a number of fronts now. Its performance is sub-par, and if you're running a large cluster, that's actually going to matter. Erlang qua Erlang I'd call a subpar language, and Elixir qua Elixir is merely competitive; there are many places to get similar capabilities, with a wide variety of other available cost/benefit choices. Erlang's message bus is not terribly resilient itself; modern message busses can be resilient against individual nodes in the message bus going down, and it's a powerful pattern to have multiple consumers against a single queue, which Erlang's focus on PIDs tends to inhibit. Erlang's message bus is 0-or-1 when as near as I can tell the rest of the world has decided, correctly IMHO, that 1-or-n is superior. Erlang is fairly insular; once you have to hook up one non-BEAM service to the system, well, you're going to do that over some sort of message bus or something, and you pretty quickly get to the point that you might as well let that be your core architecture rather than the BEAM cluster. Once you're heterogeneous, and BEAM is just another node on the net, there isn't necessarily a lot of reason to stay there. And as a system scales up, the pull to heterogeneity approaches infinity; takes a lot of work to go to an entire company and force them to work entirely in BEAM.

Plus, some of the problems Erlang solved in one way have developed better solutions. Erlang solves the problem of multiple code bases possibly simultaneously existing in the same cluster by basically making everything untyped. That was a nifty solution for the 1990s, but today I think we've gotten a lot better at having typed data structures that still retain backwards compatibility if necessary. So throwing away the entire type system, including all the methods and inheritance or composition or whatever, to solve that problem is a heck of a blow.

I do want to close out with a repetition of the fact that there is value in that solid integration. More people today are aware of the various tools like "message busses", but it is still clearly not as common knowledge as I'd like and I still see entire teams struggling along basically crafting an ad-hoc half-specified custom message bus every so often, which in 2025 is insane. (I have written a couple of services where I have basically had to provide HTTP "REST" endpoints that end up just being proxies on to my internal message bus that my system is really based on, because they'd rather POST HTTP than have to use a message bus library, even though it doesn't really buy them anything.) Erlang does help educate people about what are now the basics of cloud architecture. And that "well-integrated collection of mediocre tools" can still solve a lot of problems. Many sins can be forgiven by a 32 4GHz cores backed by high powered RAM, disk, and networking.

But it would take a lot of backwards-incompatible changes to create a BEAM 2.0 that would be competitive on all fronts... if indeed such a thing is even possible. The variety of techs exist for a reason. It stinks to have to paw through them sometimes, but the upside is you'll often find the exact right solution for your needs.