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3 HN mentions · mentioned in 3 months, 2023–2024
1:05:33 · 27K views · Apr 28, 2023
Chris McCord's ElixirConf EU 2023 keynote tracing LiveView's evolution from simple form validation to full apps, with code examples and live demos of what 1.0 will offer.
Referenced as a demo of how easily Phoenix LiveView handles things like bidirectional infinite pagination with streams.
3 comments from Hacker News
Here is actually a good article comparing the JVM with the BEAM: [LINK] -- And some of my own thoughts with a few more links: The runtime system that Erlang runs on, called the BEAM, is special in that it is engineered for distributed systems and fault tolerance in a way that the JVM isn't. Everything runs in an isolated "process" (the Erlang term for their special green-thread type thing). Talking to a process on another node in the cluster is exactly the same as talking to another process on the _same_ node, so it scales in a way most languages don't. Message passing and the guarantees of processes means you simply never have to worry about mutexes or race conditions in the same way you do in almost any other language. [LINK] [LINK] And as for Erlang vs. Elixir: Erlang is an old, somewhat unapproachable language with weird syntax and obtuse build tools. It's getting better, but it's fairly hard to use. Elixir is a modern language with a lot of nice things, that compiles to the same bytecode as Erlang, just like e.g. Scala or Kotlin for JVM bytecode. It adds powerful compile-time features like near-LISP-like macros that allow for powerful DSLs and overall contribute a lot towards a good developer experience. Elixir is also awesome because of Phoenix, notably the most-loved web framework from the 2022 StackOverflow dev survey. Here's an excerpt from a recent talk by the original creator of Phoenix giving a demo of stuff that "just works" when using Elixir/Phoenix because of i
> Liveview is incredibly straightforward. I don't agree. One of the keynotes from the 2023 ElixirConf was Chris McCord (one of the principle developers of LiveView) describing how it is almost 1.0 [1]. One thing that made me laugh a bit was him emphasizing how much Javascript he's had to write (he was referencing the fact that there is an internal community meme that you can achieve such incredible behaviors without writing Javascript ). His quip was "because I wrote it all". I wonder if you asked him "was it straightforward?" what do you think his answer would be? There are a lot of videos of people talking about how they managed to write something in LiveView. Here is one from 2022 "How I built a block based editor in LiveView" [2]. That is a good one to see how non-trivial tasks can be difficult in LiveView, describing a few times how he had to fight with it to get it to kinda-sorta do what he wanted. Certainly this man will achieve his goal since he is smart and motivated, but his description of his journey does not lead me to a conclusion of "this is incredibly straightforward". This is impressive tech no doubt, but it is far from clear it is currently reliable enough to stake a startup on. Another tangential issue I have with LiveView is the obvious requirement for a persistent socket connection ... which leads me to wonder how one would approach local-first type developments. Again, certainly possible but definitely not straightforward. 1. this video 2. [LINK]
Will keep this in mind! My ElixirConfEU keynote just used limit/offset pagination, but shows how easy it is to do bidirectional infinite pagination. Streams allows you to keep a virtualized infinite list in the DOM without keeping the giant collection around on either client or server, example: this video This demo doesn't update the URL to keep state (but push_patch would make that trivial). I'll think about more complex examples for cursor pagination, but the solution to massive collections (thousands of entries) is going to be stream + limit