I need to develop a CLI application and I’m wondering how suitable Elixir is for this kind of application. The application must be distributed to clients and it should be as simple as possible to run, ideally a static build with a single binary. I know Elixir has some build systems and I’m wondering…

Here is my summary: Are you making a CLI tool for Elixir developers only? If yes: a. Do you want to extend Mix (like mix phx.new)? If so, use mix archive b. Otherwise, use mix escript Otherwise, don’t use Elixir (for all the reasons mentioned above and for the same reasons I wouldn’t use rub…

You should not use elixir for this.

maybe I should be more specific about the different points: ideally a static build with a single binary. Not generally possible. If you’re okay with a zipped artifact that decompresses into a directory, I would argue that deployment with Elixir as a client application in theory could be easier,…

You can have a look at Bakeware , which compiles an Elixir, a Scenic or a Phoenix application into single executable binary.

Bakeware still doesn’t main problem with Elixir for CLI tooling - startup time. Most of the CLI tools is one-time quick tools that are launched often and that finish quickly. In such environment Erlang features aren’t that appealing and do not bring much to the table except familiarity.

Any language with a runtime that’s not super light like Go is not going to be good for CLI applications. If you are making a CLI app which is going to run for a bit and won’t need to be called quickly and opened many times or piped into etc, you could get away with it. It depends on the use case but…

[image] jswny: Any language with a runtime that’s not super light like Go is not going to be good for CLI applications. Disagree. Python, Ruby, Perl, etc. are quite good solution for CLI tools. Sometimes even Java is ok solution.

I’ve written several CLI apps in elixir for interactive use (i.e. converting data, automating ansible, etc) using escripts. Due to familiarity I write Elixir code much faster than anything else and it works great if you can don’t mind the ~200ms “boot time” (depending on machine of course) to run t…

From a pure runtime startup time perspective: perl < python2 < python3 < ruby < java < elixir < nodejs So elixir is not the worst. Hell, many CLI programs are written in nodejs; I cringe every time I run webpack.

I think really the main reasons why I usually wouldn’t go for elixir for a CLI app is that you probably won’t get or need it’s best benefits in a CLI too. Things like reliability and recovery features, distributed computing, maybe concurrency. But you’d still have to deal with a lot of the tradeoffs…

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How suitable is Elixir for a CLI application?

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hauleth December 13, 2020, 5:07pm 3

Use Go, Zig, or Rust for that. Elixir is a poor choice there.