Elixir: The Documentary
History of a language and community built on the robust Erlang VM foundation
Source
YouTube
Official movie Elixir: The Documentary from CultRepo
What is the film about?
The documentary explores the origins of Elixir, its development, and how the community around the language has grown rapidly since 2011. Special attention is paid to how Elixir works with competition and what opportunities this opens up for engineers.
The film features the language's creator and key people from the community, and the story highlights the power of open source and the contributions of the people who made Elixir a mature platform.
What is Elixir
Dynamic functional language
Elixir is designed to develop scalable and maintainable applications.
Based on Erlang VM
Elixir runs on top of the Erlang VM, providing a fault-tolerant and scalable foundation.
Contribution to the ecosystem
The language was designed to leverage Erlang's strengths without sacrificing performance and to develop the overall ecosystem.
Open source by default
Elixir's source code is maintained by the team and developed openly.
Key milestones
First commit
The first changes to the Elixir repository date back to January 9, 2011.
R&D at Plataformatec
Jose Valim created Elixir as an R&D project within Plataformatec.
Release of Elixir v1.0
In September 2014, release 1.0 was released with the promise of stable compatibility within the v1 branch.
Documentary release
CultRepo releases Elixir: The Documentary on YouTube.
Elixir v1.9: built-in releases
Elixir now has a built-in mechanism for assembling releases via mix release.
Phoenix LiveView v0.1.0
An early version of LiveView appears and strengthens the server-side realtime approach in the Elixir ecosystem.
Livebook v0.1.0
The ecosystem receives an interactive notebook environment for learning, prototyping and knowledge sharing.
Nx v0.1.0
The ecosystem is forming the direction of numerical computing and ML/AI for Elixir.
Elixir v1.15
Focus on developer experience: diagnostics, compilation improvements and tools for large codebases.
Elixir v1.17
New features of the standard library and development of tooling for modern versions of Erlang/OTP.
How language develops
SemVer after 1.0
Since the 1.0 release, Elixir has followed semantic versioning and remains compatible within v1.
Releases every 6 months
New minor versions are released approximately twice a year, around May and November.
Apache 2.0
Elixir source code is licensed under Apache 2.0 and maintained by the language team.