Why did we choose Elixir for the backend development of MoodleNet?

MoodleNet says it chose Elixir for backend development after research into frontend and backend languages. The post points to a detailed wiki page and summarizes the main benefits of Elixir and Phoenix for the project.

Reading notes

#

• The team decided to use Elixir for backend development after Mayel researched languages and compared options.
• Phoenix is presented as faster than Rails, PHP, and Python in one benchmark and more consistent under load.
• The Erlang VM is described as a good fit for scaling by adding servers and for concurrency on multi-core CPUs.
• The post says developer time matters as much as server performance, so productivity and programmer wellbeing were part of the choice.
• Elixir is described as reliable because it runs on the Erlang VM, which has long been used in highly reliable systems.
• The language is presented as simple for running many processes, flexible for building applications other frameworks cannot support, and correct because Ecto works with database constraints and user-facing error messages.
• The downsides mentioned are Elixir’s relative newness and the difficulty of finding developers, though the team says that second problem is already solved for MoodleNet.