What libc stuff are you missing? (I'm rather interested in the answer to this question! :) )
It's entirely possible that the functions that you want are available in the Erlang standard library, which can be trivially accessed from Elixir.
Subprocess control, e.g. popen seems different/hard. We are using Porcelain though, which is nice. This thread on the list about working with pty's didn't inspire confidence either: http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.elixir.general/457...
Another Unixy thing that's missing in a hard-to-believe sort of way is Unix domain sockets. Makes connecting to Postgres irritating.
