Over the past couple of years, we wrote extensively about Ruby (and Ruby on Rails), so you know we like it a lot.

We’ve also dabbled some in Elixir (and Phoenix), but never before have we compared the two side by side to see which one can be a better fit for you and when. So here it goes.

The Story of Ruby and Elixir (and Phoenix)

Ruby and Ruby on Rails probably need no introduction. They are both widely used tools for writing web applications. Ruby, created as far back as 1995, was built to make the developer work more productive and fun. Ruby on Rails lets developers write applications fast with the use of many gems—libraries with features. In the hands of experienced developers, RoR is an excellent Web development framework for building highly functional, usable, and robust Web apps.

RoR has changed the landscape of Web app development. By introducing tools that facilitate fast app development and focusing on the pleasurable aspect of coding, it set the direction other Web frameworks soon followed.

Ruby and Elixir share many similarities. Elixir’s creator, José Valim, was a Rails core team member. He appreciated Ruby’s flexibility and clean and elegant syntax, but the more he worked with Ruby, the more room for improvement he began to notice. His main concern revolved around Ruby’s code limits in concurrency and throughput. It became clear to José what he needed to do—take what’s best in Ruby and build something entirely different on top of it. Based on the Erlang VM to solve concurrency limitations, Elixir was conceived.

As to Phoenix, a web framework for Elixir, it was put together by Chris McCord. Having come from the same Rails background as José, Chris borrowed essential ingredients from Rails to his Phoenix project, with an intention to create a framework that would ultimately outperform Rails.

#ruby/rails #elixir #development #ruby and elixir