Brex's engineering blog on backend choices, APIs, rewards software, and GPT-4 prompting.
Commenters mostly cite the post on Brex leaving Elixir for Kotlin, noting reasons like the time spent maintaining internal libraries.
I was wondering why Brex left Elixir, and what happened to all of the tooling they created to work in the language. From their blog[1]:
> Building and maintaining internal libraries to support Elixir as our primary backend language became time consuming, and few other users in the ecosystem seemed to share enough use cases to make OSS collaboration mutually beneficial.
The whole point of giving things, and contributing code, is to do it without the expectation of a return or that anyone will even use it. It’s the mystery and the surprise of the way in which others benefit that makes our entire ecosystem work. When companies ride on the volunteer labor of others to become worth billions, and then come up with all sorts of excuses for why they can’t give back... I guess the success of AWS demonstrates that nobody will care.
1: https://medium.com/brexeng/building-backend-services-with-kotlin-7c8410795e4b
Do you reject learning any language that has been migrated away from by any company? Why not make up your own mind about whether it is nice instead of depending on rumours about other companies?
In any case you could have easily googled "brex elixir" and have found their blog explaining their reasoning as the first result: https://medium.com/brexeng/building-backend-services-with-kotlin-7c8410795e4b
Hey,
I'm the author of the post and we built the API on Kotlin and some of them are our earliest Kotlin services. We're using Micronaut OpenAPI to generate specs.
You're right in that it's hard to do many of these things in Elixir and it was a big factor in us moving away from Elixir. I wrote a bit about it here https://medium.com/brexeng/building-backend-services-with-kotlin-7c8410795e4b
@runj__ You should read this blog post by Brex founder. He really says how Elixir suited well to the problem they were trying to solve https://medium.com/brexeng/why-brex-chose-elixir-fe1a4f313195
Elixir to Kotlin
https://medium.com/brexeng/building-backend-services-with-kotlin-7c8410795e4b
Note that Brex founders are Brazilian and the Elixir author is Brazilian.
(2021)
Unfortunately Brex doesn't use Elixir anymore
https://medium.com/brexeng/building-backend-services-with-kotlin-7c8410795e4b