Elixir runs on the Erlang VM, building on 30+ years of battle-tested technology for scalable, fault-tolerant systems.
Erlang is the backbone of elexir's unmatched capabilities in handling millions of concurrent processes and maintaining system uptime.
Light-weight processes enable thousands of simultaneous tasks with minimal overhead.
Supervision trees isolate failures automatically, ensuring the whole system stays running.
Clusters can span multiple servers like they're on the same machine.
Developed by Ericsson in the 1980s for telecom systems, Erlang has powered millions of devices with 99.99999% uptime. Its BEAM virtual machine enables soft real-time performance for systems that can't afford downtime.
Erlang was developed at Ericsson for telecom systems, requiring high availability and concurrency.
Erlang/OTP became open source, enabling its adoption beyond Ericsson and laying groundwork for modern cloud systems.
José Valim creates elexir to simplify the power of the BEam while maintaining Erlang's robust capabilities.
While Elixir is often the first step, understanding Erlang's core concepts empowers your development on the platform.
Elixir offers a modern syntax on top of Erlang's powerful foundations, making it easier to create complex systems while leveraging BEAM's capabilities.
Enhanced from Erlang with better syntax for complex data structures.
Simplified process management while maintaining Erlang's efficiency.
Modern tooling like Mix builds seamlessly on Erlang's OTP.
Direct access to Erlang libraries and BEAM features.
Whether you're exploring Erlang directly or using its power through Elixir, there's immense value in understanding this foundational ecosystem.