NOTE: this article was originally posted on the Hex blog. This is just a re-post for my own blog.

I’m incredibly excited to announce the new web-based Hex package differ: diff.hex.pm, maintained by the Hex team! This is the result of the issue on the hex.pm Github repo and the discussion it started.

I’m super grateful to the Hex team, Eric Meadows-Jönsson, Wojtek Mach, and Todd Resudek, for all their support and help in turning this idea into a live service.

What does it do?

In short, you input any Hex package name and a version range, and it will generate a highlighted git diff for you, right there in your browser. Not only that, but you can also share the link to the diff, and even highlight a specific row. Please take a moment to try it out!

Why do we need it?

Across language ecosystems, package dependencies are becoming a more and more common vector of attack. Looking at npm or...

GenStage is a pull-based system, where consumers pull events from the producers, and most of the documentation describes this. But it can also be used as a push-based one. The idea is straightforward, consumers register their demand with the producer, and if the producer has buffered events it will satisfy it immediately, otherwise, it keeps track of how much demand it has received. When new events are pushed into the producer it passes it on to the consumers while decreasing the demand stored in state. GenStage handles the distribution of the events automatically to the waiting consumers.

This blog post is mostly educational, but this pattern can be applied effectively on all kinds of use cases.

Let’s take a look at a stripped-down example. We’ll set up a producer that accepts messages from any other process, like a regular GenServer, and distributes them to the consumers. We’ll avoid...

Elixir doesn’t provide its own data structures, instead, it uses the ones provided by Erlang. Many of them are wrapped by Elixir modules and have shorthand syntax, to make them easier to work with. You’ve seen [], {}, and %{}, and the modules List, Tuple, and Map. Elixir also exposes “structs”, which are maps with special behaviors associated with them. Some structs are treated as opaque, like MapSet, with its own set of functions to interact with it. But Erlang has a few more data types that, because they’re not wrapped in Elixir, you might not have been introduced to yet. This article is about the one I’ve had the most use of, :queue.

Erlang queues are similar to lists but double-ended, meaning you can efficiently insert items to both the front and the rear of it. It is also known as a “first in first out”, or FIFO, data structure. The Erlang documentation describes it:

Queues are...

This article attempts to show some basic patterns for how to use ETS in Elixir or Erlang, working around the limitations and giving you some examples of how to use them effectively in your own codebase. The intended audience is someone interested in using ETS but unsure of where to put the table and how to manage it. Note that none of the examples are “complete”, although each of them attempts to showcase key concepts in the logistics and use of ETS, none of them are just ready to copy paste into your project. They’re over-simplified to make them more accessible and each one just demonstrates some features. This is more of a learning exercise than anything else. By necessity, the article also touches on the subject of concurrency in Elixir (and ironically, how to “avoid” it).

ETS is a really cool tool in the Erlang runtime system, but to understand it you may need a little context. I...

I want to share a simple pattern for setting up HTTP based health checks for Plug/Phoenix applications. Health checks can be used for anything from uptime measuring to readiness/liveness probes for platforms like Kubernetes och ECS. The most simple version of one accepts requests on some specific path and responds with a 200. Another consideration is that it might run very frequently (ECS by default checks around 6 times a second) so it’s also ideal to run it as light as possible, and not generate logs. Finally, personally, I prefer having it out of the way of routing and controllers because I see it as separate from the functionality of the application. Skip to the bottom for a suggestion on how to avoid logging health checks in Phoenix while still using Phoenix.Router.

This code example works even if you don’t use Phoenix since it’s just a plug.

defmodule HealthCheck do
  import

The Elixir 1.9 changelog includes a new function for registries, reasonably overshadowed by the new release task and better config handling. I want to tell you a bit about Registry.select/2, what it does, and why it’s exciting. This will also include a very brief introduction to how Erlang match specs work.

Backstory and my experience contributing to Elixir

A while ago I was working on a project where I needed to dynamically start and stop workers polling some third-party service. This was a straightforward setup of GenServer workers, a DynamicSupervisor to keep them, a Registry to look up existing workers, and finally, a coordinating GenServer that starts and stops workers (let’s call it Coordinator). The canonical truth of what workers should be active was in a Postgres database, so periodically the Coordinator would get the latest list of active services. It would then diff that...

Update: Since writing this post I’ve learned a lot. Check the very bottom of the article for some errata.

This post was inspired by a thread I participated in on the Elixir forum. The original post pointed to an article that compared a series of scripts implementing the same functionality, basically pretty-printing a sorted word count. The author of the post on the forum also provided an Elixir version, which was underperforming compared to the other scripts.

Now before you question the point of this. Yes, you’re right, Elixir is probably not the way to go for writing efficient string processing scripts. Not only does the VM start up a bit slower than Ruby or Python, it just isn’t designed or developed for this. But that doesn’t explain such a large difference in execution time.

To set the stage, here are the original article’s benchmark results. Take a look if you’re curious, you can...