Is Elixir / Phoenix Mainstream Yet?
We can all agree that Elixir and Phoenix are in stable versions already. But if we want to answer the question from the title, we need to look into it from a wider perspective. When can we say that a framework becomes mainstream?
Commercial use
The framework has to be used commercially. In my opinion that’s the first and main requirement for something to become mainstream. There is already quite an impressive list of companies using Elixir. Some of them are:
Phoenix’s application deployment is a piece of cake. There’s a magnificent documentation that will get you through the process on Heroku or your own server.
Fame
The technology needs fame too. And what I mean by fame is that it needs to suit people’s interests.
Here we can see the increase of talks about Elixir language in the last 3 years. The source does not include all the talks, but it shows the dynamic growth even so. Especially after first Elixir Conference in 2014.
People are also getting more interested in Elixir’s meetups. According to meetup.com, there were already 115 encounters all over the world with 16,634 members participating. We have organised the first Elixir meetup in Warsaw ourselves. We didn’t expect it will attract so many people that our spot would be literally overflowing with guests!
Contributors
Comparing the Phoenix’s number of contributors on GitHub with Rails (or Django) shows us it hasn’t got a big community yet, but it’s steadily growing. For now, there are 250 contributors on GitHub for Phoenix and about 350 for Elixir. Let’s check other reliable statistics — the amount of available packages. According to Hex.pm, the main source of libraries, there are over 1500 “hexes” made, with 7000 versions. The amount of available packages increased in about 2000% over last two years!
Growth of Elixir Packages
Furthermore, there are about 150.000 downloads per day and almost 17 millions in total!
Learners
It’s not all about contributors, who develop and maintain the technology though. It’s also about the people who want to learn it — “The Consumers”. It’s hard to count that kind of people, but we can guess the amount by using the laws of supply and demand. There are a lot of resources for learning Elixir language. When I was starting as a Rails developer the first and one of the most helpful resource was RailsCasts. The equivalent for Elixir — ElixirSips, has over 210 episodes of tutorials made in a quite short period of time. It’s updated with 2 episodes per week, so we can all agree that there’s a supply of learning.
Summary
To answer the question from the title: Elixir is not mainstream yet, although both the language and Phoenix framework are unquestionably production ready. Companies and startups still prefer fully proven ways to develop their web apps, but more and more developers are showing interest in the new technology. I’m completely sure that the time of Elixir and Phoenix is coming fast. There is nothing to prevent Elixir from getting the same popularity within a year that Ruby gained back in the days. The best time to give it a shot is now. Otherwise you could fall behind. Better try Elixir yourself now!
