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Comparing Elixir with Rust and Go

Blog post from LogRocket

Post Details
Company
Date Published
Author
Ahmad Rosid
Word Count
3,417
Language
-
Hacker News Points
-
Summary

When evaluating programming languages for building scalable and concurrent systems, Elixir, Go, and Rust emerge as strong contenders, each with distinct advantages and challenges. Elixir, running on the Erlang VM, excels in handling concurrency with a functional programming paradigm, making it a preferred choice for companies like Discord and WhatsApp for their high-traffic applications. Go, known for its efficient concurrency mechanisms through goroutines and channels, outperforms in speed but has higher memory usage due to its garbage collection system, as demonstrated by its performance in web crawling benchmarks. Rust, while not natively supporting threads like the others, offers memory safety through its ownership model and uses Tokio for asynchronous programming, providing efficient memory usage but requiring more complex code for concurrency. Each language presents unique benefits: Elixir for fault tolerance and ease of concurrent programming, Go for speed and built-in concurrency support, and Rust for memory efficiency and safety, allowing developers to choose based on their specific needs.