Elixir is a functional, concurrent, general-purpose, open source meta-programming aware language built on top of the Erlang Virtual Machine (BEAM). It mostly imports Erlang’s syntax.
Elixir is a dynamic language with macros that leverages Erlang’s ability to build concurrent, distributed, and fault-tolerant applications with hot code upgrades. It combines the robust functional programming of Erlang with an approach that looks more like Ruby.
Elixir provides a first class macro mechanism, supports polymorphism via protocols (similar to Clojure’s) and many other features while keeping the functional aspects of Erlang.
Features include:
- Complete and automatic hardware detection.
- A language targeting Erlang Virtual Machine (BEAM).
- Protocol-based inheritance.
- Seamless Erlang integration: zero-penalty Erlang function calls (and vice versa).
- Meta programming via macros and a first-class AST.
- Polymorphism via protocols inspired by Clojure.
- Shared-nothing concurrent programming via message passing (Actor model).
- Emphasis on recursion and higher-order functions instead of side-effect-based looping.
- Everything is an expression.
- Message passing.
- Pattern matching.
- Provides both lists, tuples, and a special syntax to create a list of keywords.
- Support for streams, sets.
- Support for reducers.
- Metaprogramming via macros.
- Unicode support and UTF-8 strings.
Website: elixir-lang.org
Support: Blog
Developer: José Valim
License: Apache License v2
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