Being a moderately frequent user of Opus and having spoken to people who use it actively at work for automation, it's a really expensive model to run, I've heard it burn through a company's weekend's credit allocation before Saturday morning, I think using almost an order of magnitude more tokens is a valid consumer concern!
I have yet to hear anyone say "Opus is really good value for money, a real good economic choice for us". It seems that we're trying to retrofit every possible task with SOTA AI that is still severely lacking in solid reasoning, reliability/dependability, so we throw more money at the problem (cough Opus) in the hopes that it will surpass that barrier of trust.
You could make the same argument for any language. It still requires you to think and implement the solution yourself, just at a certain level of abstraction.
This stands to reason. If you need to bridge different languages together like in your case, they need to speak a common tongue. REST/GrahQL/gRPC solve this problem in different ways. There is no technical limitation keeping you from serving HTTP traffic from Erlang/Elixir, but from my own experience it isn't a pleasant experience. JavaScript or Python are dead simple, until you realise that 64-bit integers are not a thing in JS, and need to be handled as strings. Similarly, tuples will give you hell in Python.
On the other hand, if you don't need to cross that boundary, the BEAM will very happily talk to itself and let you send messages between processes without having to even think about serialisation or whether you're even on the same machine. After all, everything is just data with no pointers or cyclic references. That's more that can be said for most other languages, and while Python's pickle is pretty close, you can probably even share Erlang's equivalent of file descriptors across servers (haven't tried, correct me if I'm wrong), which is pretty insane when you think about it.
> I have found the real value of Erlang to be internally between trusted nodes of my own physical infrastructure as a high-level distributed "brain" or control plane
I think this is pretty high praise, considering it's about as old as C and was originally designed for real-time telephone switches.
> There is no technical limitation keeping you from serving HTTP traffic from Erlang/Elixir, but from my own experience it isn't a pleasant experience.
I would be interested in what was unpleasant? I've run inets httpd servers (which I did feel maybe exposed too much functionality), and yaws servers and yaws seems just fine. maybe yaws_api is a bit funky, too. I don't know the status of ACME integration, which I guess could make things unpleasant; when I was using it for work, we used a commercial CA, and my current personal work with it doesn't involve TLS, so I don't need a cert.
> you can probably even share Erlang's equivalent of file descriptors across servers (haven't tried, correct me if I'm wrong)
Ports are not network transparent. You can't directly send to a port from a different node. You could probably work with a remote Port with the rpc server, or some other service you write to proxy ports. You can pass ports over dist, and you can call erlang:node(Port) to find the origin node if you don't know it already, but you'd definitely need to write some sort of proxy if you want to receive from the port.
Perhaps I was a little harsh, this was a few years back when I was evaluating Elixir for a client, but ended up going back to a TS/Node.js stack instead. While the Phoenix documentation is stellar, I found it difficult to find good resources on best practices. I was probably doing something stupid and ran into internal and difficult to understand exceptions being raised on the Erlang side, from Cowboy if I recall. In another case, I was trying to validate API JSON input, the advice I got was to use Ecto (which I never really groked) or pattern match and fail. In JS, libraries like Zod and Valibot are a dream to work with.
The result was a lot of frustration, having been thoroughly impressed by Elixir and Phoenix in the past, knowing that I already knew how to achieve the same goal with Node.js with less code and would be able to justify the choice to a client. It didn't quite feel "there" to pick up and deploy, whereas SvelteKit with tRPC felt very enabling at the time and was easily picked up by others. Perhaps I need another project to try it out again and convince me otherwise. Funnily enough, a year later I replaced a problematic Node.js sever with Phoenix + Nerves running on a RPi Zero (ARM), flawless cross-compilation and deployment.
No, they aren't. You have to use BigInt, which will throw an error if you try to serialise it to JSON or combine it with ordinary numbers. If you happen to need to deserialise a 64-bit integer from JSON, which I sadly had to do, you need a custom parser to construct the BigInt from a raw string directly.
To extend upon this, memory generally has a single owner. When it goes out of scope, it gets freed [1]. The drop() function, which appears analogous to free() in C/C++, is actually just an empty function who's sole purpose is to take ownership and make it go out of scope, which immediately frees the memory [2].
> This function is not magic; it is literally defined as: pub fn drop<T>(_x: T) {}
This is usually more deterministic than GC languages (no random pauses), but can be less efficient for highly nested data structures. It also makes linked lists impossible without using "unsafe rust", as it doesn't abide by the normal ownership rules.
Linked lists to arbitrary memory, yes. Linked list from a consecutive chunk of memory managed by a bump allocator: just as easy as any language, no need for unsafe.
Admittedly not the easiest language to make a linked list in.
Franken UI is an HTML-first, open-source library of UI components based on the utility-first Tailwind CSS with UIkit 3 compatibility. The design is based on shadcn/ui ported to be framework-agnostic.
Oh wow, I haven't seen Franken UI - this looks great, I can definitely look to port some of these.
I guess I've been taking an opinionated approach to start by taking components I had already built from my other projects and compiling them here for now.
This is clean JavaScript syntax in my opinion and should be what people strive for. It's perfectly readable, it's faster, it does async correctly without any unnecessary computation, can be typed and will have a normal stack trace. Piping is cool when done right, but can introduce complexity fast. Elixir is a good example where it works wonderfully.
I think this is a great use case. From my experience, having everything in one language is a huge plus. You can pull data from the database and just inject it into the view. The closest I've gotten to this in the JS/TS world is a Prisma + tRPC + SvelteKit for E2E type safety, but there's a huge cost in complexity and language server performance and some extra boilerplate.
The main limitation is likely offline apps, LiveView requires a persistent connect to the server. I doubt this is something you'll encounter for your use case.
I decided to use Tauri for the first time for a university project and it was absolutely painless to design a small and useful GUI application to programatically generate schematics for photolithography masks.
- Single lightweight binary install and executable (~6 MB), clean uninstall
- Automatic updates (digitally signed, uploaded to a small VM)
- Integrates nicely with SvelteKit and TailwindCSS
- The Rust backend was able to integrate with GTSDK over FFI. The cmake crate made C++ compilation and linking automatic as part of cargo build, provided that a C++ toolchain is available (no problems even on Windows).
- No scary toolchain setup with a load of licenses to review and accept (looking at you, Flutter. I'm a student, not a lawyer. Although perhaps this will also be a thing with Tauri + Android?)
For a small project, I can't recommend it enough. I wouldn't know where to start with a C# or Qt GUI application, especially if I wanted to make it cross-platform.
It'll be interesting to see if it gains any traction in the mobile space. Flutter is great and may be better optimised for certain rendering techniques, such as infinite lists, but sticking with web technologies is a very compelling advantage.
.NET MAUI is cross-platform and very easy to get started with, but would sacrifice a lot of performance to gain the convenience and simplicity of the development experience.
The lack of a WASM target is another, although UNO project in the past provided such a target for MAUI's very closely-related predecessor (Xamarin.Forms).
I guess this comes down to personal preference. For me, this is mixing the interface with the implementation. You shouldn't need to know how something works to be able to use it, for me, that's the real overhead. Maybe this works on a small scale, but what if the source code changes?
That being said, I do like inspecting the source from time to understand it better, or make up for missing documentation. Sometimes though, with this being JS, I wish that I could unsee the things that I've seen, code that production depends upon, deep within the dependency tree.
I agree with the idea of fluency when writing without types, but for me it's not about how fast you can write code. Code for me is a lot of rereading and understanding what the hell you wrote just a few days ago, I find typed code easier to get back into and it's faster to find things that broke in parts of the codebase that you're less familiar with when you change something.
I have yet to hear anyone say "Opus is really good value for money, a real good economic choice for us". It seems that we're trying to retrofit every possible task with SOTA AI that is still severely lacking in solid reasoning, reliability/dependability, so we throw more money at the problem (cough Opus) in the hopes that it will surpass that barrier of trust.