Posted by bbg2401 7 hours ago
If you must default to dark mode that’s your choice but I’d love to see a light mode toggle somewhere prominent.
One consequence of software recently supporting light and dark schemes is that UI designs end up committing to all white or all dark, rather than tastefully choosing a color scheme that best frames its content in context.
Dark mode feels correct, but it is hostile. Now blue light on the other hand... you should get filters for your monitor/glasses.
Minor typo in the Erlang card:
“Elixir also excels at IoT, distributed systems, and everything the Erlang is renowned for”
should probably be “everything the Erlang VM is known for” or “everything Erlang is known for.”
I'm hoping to find a reason to use it soon.
I first reached for Elixir when Ruby couldn't handle large amounts of websocket messages. It really shines in high-concurrency contexts. I also love Phoenix LiveView and have a couple of side-projects running on it.
Do you have a program that doesn't need to run fast?
(wip, no guarantees, this is the engine i use)
For me as a long-term ruby user, though, elixir is not quite as elegant as it could or should have been. Even simple things such as "defmodule Xyz do" feels weird to me.
Love how dedicated you all are to providing clear entrypoints and being thoughtful around documentation!
Sorry, I meant the subjects (LLMs, ML, AI) are intertwined, not the people. But what I was getting at with my comment is that (IMO) most people see them as distinct things, even on HN where most know that LLMs use ML. As an analogy, it's like physics versus mathematics: separate subjects in most everyone's mind, and even separate academic departments, but physics is still math.
>Might as well use LLMs for the whole thing next time, since we will be accused of doing so anyway! :D
The only sloppy aspects that stand out to me are the needless animations/transitions.
But it's blazing fast which is good to see.
Hoping Elixir continues to thrive. It is such a great language (and such a great language for AI coding too!)
OT: I wish more funding & development effort went into BEAM itself on making it more performant.
Note: I’m not talking concurrency. I’m talking pure raw performance.
Seems like it’s been a one person show for over a decade on making it faster.
I suspect once the Erlang/OTP team squeezes all performance in the JIT, they will look into optimizing across modules, which will probably open up many new possibilities, but it requires rethinking some runtime primitives.
Knowing what I know now, I would’ve tried to push for a threaded interpreter to get rid of the runtime overhead of dispatching altogether. I don’t know if they’ve changed the architecture of that module much since I left :-)
You’re an inspiration for many. Thank you.
I’m curious to know what your top 3 hopes for BEAM itself are for the coming years (in any area that you think would make it better).
1. The cross module optimizations I mentioned above 2. Have a WASM target for the runtime itself 3. Make it easier to ship single file executables with the whole VM
But they are really “nice-to-have”s. I have been a happy user for 15+ years!
You can get substantial performance improvements by using guards though. See what Wings3D does with is_float() everywhere in hot numeric-heavy code.