It’s pretty common in the Elixir ecosystem for these types of libraries to not change very much. Elixir itself doesn’t change too much so these libraries stay solid without needing frequent updates. It doesn’t mean people aren’t using them. Some libraries even put disclaimers that they are actively maintained even if they haven’t seen an update in a long time. It’s something that takes some getting used to for some people (including myself at one point).
I will second this. I've been using multiple libraries in our production Elixir app that haven't been updated in the last five years. Elixir itself was declared as "stable" feature-wise years ago. It may be argued that the type system being introduced is not in-keeping with that, but not sure. Jose is a very cautious and diligent "benevolent dictator" and you get a lot of backward compatibility guarantees. Erlang is the same. Compared to what some people might be used to with churn in Node/React etc it is apples and oranges.
The semantics can certainly be argued, but a type system is sort of on its own tier of as far as language features go. Most importantly, there is only going to be one backward incompatible change which is the spec syntax, otherwise it is just leveraging how we already write Elixir.
Yes, I'm not worried about it. I've not been following it as closely as I'd like, but from what I've read the core team seems to be taking a very measured incremental approach with the type system.
> It’s pretty common in the Elixir ecosystem for these types of libraries to not change very much.
This is kind of fascinating and seems worthy of more detailed study. I'm sure almost anything looks stable compared to javascript/python ecosystems, but would be interesting to see how other ecosystems with venerable old web-frameworks or solid old compression libraries compare. But on further reflection.. language metrics like "popularity" are also in danger of just quantifying the churn that it takes to keep working stuff working. You can't even measure strictly new projects and hope that helps, because new projects may be a reaction to perceived need to replace other stuff that's annoyingly unstable over periods of 5-10 years, etc.
Some churn is introduced by trying to keep up with a changing language, standard lib, or other dependencies, but some is just adding features forever or endlessly refactoring aesthetics under different management. Makes me wish for a project badge to indicate a commitment like finished-except-for-bugfixes.
Erlang (and friends) are built with a goal of stability. Operational stability is part of that, but it also comes into play with code and architectural stability.
Maybe it's the functionalness, maybe it's the problem domains, but a lot of the modules have clear boundaries and end up with pretty small modules where the libraries end up having a clear scope and a small code base that moves towards being obviously correct and good for most and then doesn't have much changes after that. It might not work for everyone, but most modules don't end up with lots of options to support all the possible use cases.
The underlying bits of OTP don't tend to churn too much either, so old code usually continues to work, unless you managed to have a dependency on something that had a big change. I recall dealing with some changes in timekeeping and random sources, but otherwise I don't remember having to change my Erlang code for OTP updates.
It helps that the OTP team is supporting several major versions (annual releases) simultaneously, so if there's a lot of unneccessary change, that makes their job harder as well as everyone else's.
That is not what I meant. I looked at sorted_set_nif which doesn't seem to compile on OTP 26 (we're at 27 now), and fastglobal which has a very old PR with 3 approvals has not been merged. Elixir libraries may not change _much_ but core libraries like telemetry, Ecto, ExDoc, Jason, still get either minor or patch releases all the time.
If libraries get regular updates even if they are minor, it indicates they are in use. If they have inactive repositories and low hex.pm download numbers, they may have been abandoned which can mean you have to maintain it yourself in the future, or the people behind the library found it's not such a good idea after all. This doesn't have to be the case, which is why I asked.
Ah ya, I do see how the optics of this could give off that impression. I don't use this library myself, but the issue is with Elixir 1.15.7 & OPT 26.1.26 which is VERY different than "It doesn't work on OTP 26." Certain patch versions of Elixir and OTP have caused problems before (sorry, I don't have a citation) and this particular issue looks like it's related to dependencies not syncing up on the config change?
I do think more libraries should give that little "We're still maintained" notice as people not totally ingrained in this might not realize. To some, the fact that there have been no issues reported now that we're on OPT 27 and Elixir 17 would be an indicator that all is well.
Rustler wasn't properly forward compatible (only with regard to the build process, a compiled library will work just fine on any newer OTP) until 0.29. They are using 0.22, upgrading Rustler will be enough to get rid of this issue for all future OTP versions.
Thank you for the full story here as I just gave the issue a cursory glance. As someone quite ingrained in Elixir, I see an issue referencing specific patch versions of Elixir and OTP and immediately understand it's very specifically targeting that specific Elixir/OTP combo. But depr brings up a good point that not everyone is immediately going to understand this, especially newcommers to the language and it’s generally hard not to just read the headline.
Yeah I was trying to explain this to another developer that packages end up being “finished” eventually and seem to continue to work exceptionally well without updates for a really long time.
Something about immutability and the structure of Elixir leads to surprisingly few bugs.
