Beam really is a marvel.

copy one write and immutable data structures mean you ca have garbage collection reserved for the termination of a thread whihc would be a nontrivial task in languages that encourage mutability cough go cough

Beam processes are a blessing

its also extremely tuned for creating threads that are super lightweight. consequently, scaling strategies that are optimal in elixir would be a TERRIBLE idea in other languages. You could make a dynamic cluster of node/go instances that communicate over rabbitmq and have a supervisor process that can keep track of their state and resurrection in case of a crash. Its going to be error prone and take weeks of fiddling to get right. beam gives you that out of the box. Its not perfect but its more than good enough for your first 10000 customers.

This benefit extends all the way up to Phoenix. because threads are trivial to create and the overhead is low, its a viable strategy to generate a stateful process for every user as they interact with the system, this is what allows liveview to be so powerful.

Each channel connection gets its own thread as well. A single machine can handle thousands of threads this way with full isolation. one thread crashing won't affect your other connections. nodejs cannot provide that. if a web-socket connection crashes a node instance, it ends the connection for every customer currently connected to that node.

Every attempt I've seen outside beam to recreate this revolve around OS level process which have a higher overhead and then they still need to create a mesasge passing protcol and supervision system. since OS threads are epensive, it wouldn't be a. good idea to try creating something like liveview as you'll overload your machine.

So you might say, "ok, I'll craete a multicluster virtual machine optimized for immutable data structures with a built in intra process messaging protocol for communication as well as a higher level super vision process. at that point, I'll say "congratulations, you just reinvented the beam, lets see if we can port other languages to it!"

anyways, if you're looking for something a little smaller for now, I highly recommend really understanding ecto and how it has you interact with databases. its easily the best database library I've worked with. precisely because it isn't a orm. It maps sql rows to elixir records which has much less of an impedance mismatch. its achieves almost zero friction between your database and your api.