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    José Valim, Guillaume Duboc, and Giuseppe Castagna on the Future of Types in Elixir

    en-usJune 08, 2023
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    About this Episode

    It’s the Season 10 finale of the Elixir Wizards podcast! José Valim, Guillaume Duboc, and Giuseppe Castagna join Wizards Owen Bickford and Dan Ivovich to dive into the prospect of types in the Elixir programming language! They break down their research on set-theoretical typing and highlight their goal of creating a type system that supports as many Elixir idioms as possible while balancing simplicity and pragmatism. José, Guillaume, and Giuseppe talk about what initially sparked this project, the challenges in bringing types to Elixir, and the benefits that the Elixir community can expect from this exciting work. Guillaume's formalization and Giuseppe's "cutting-edge research" balance José's pragmatism and "Guardian of Orthodoxy" role. Decades of theory meet the needs of a living language, with open challenges like multi-process typing ahead. They come together with a shared joy of problem-solving that will accelerate Elixir's continued growth. Key Topics Discussed in this Episode: Adding type safety to Elixir through set theoretical typing How the team chose a type system that supports as many Elixir idioms as possible Balancing simplicity and pragmatism in type system design Addressing challenges like typing maps, pattern matching, and guards The tradeoffs between Dialyzer and making types part of the core language Advantages of typing for catching bugs, documentation, and tooling The differences between typing in the Gleam programming language vs. Elixir The possibility of type inference in a set-theoretic type system The history and development of set-theoretic types over 20 years Gradual typing techniques for integrating typed and untyped code How José and Giuseppe initially connected through research papers Using types as a form of "mechanized documentation" The risks and tradeoffs of choosing syntax Cheers to another decade of Elixir! A big thanks to this season’s guests and all the listeners! Links and Resources Mentioned in this Episode: Bringing Types to Elixir | Guillaume Duboc & Giuseppe Castagna | ElixirConf EU 2023 (https://youtu.be/gJJH7a2J9O8) Keynote: Celebrating the 10 Years of Elixir | José Valim | ElixirConf EU 2022 (https://youtu.be/Jf5Hsa1KOc8) OCaml industrial-strength functional programming https://ocaml.org/ ℂDuce: a language for transformation of XML documents http://www.cduce.org/ Ballerina coding language https://ballerina.io/ Luau coding language https://luau-lang.org/ Gleam type language https://gleam.run/ "The Design Principles of the Elixir Type System" (https://www.irif.fr/_media/users/gduboc/elixir-types.pdf) by G. Castagna, G. Duboc, and J. Valim "A Gradual Type System for Elixir" (https://dlnext.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3427081.3427084) by M. Cassola, A. Talagorria, A. Pardo, and M. Viera "Programming with union, intersection, and negation types" (https://www.irif.fr/~gc/papers/set-theoretic-types-2022.pdf), by Giuseppe Castagna "Covariance and Contravariance: a fresh look at an old issue (a primer in advanced type systems for learning functional programmers)" (https://www.irif.fr/~gc/papers/covcon-again.pdf) by Giuseppe Castagna "A reckless introduction to Hindley-Milner type inference" (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vTS8K4NBSi9iyCrPo/a-reckless-introduction-to-hindley-milner-type-inference) Special Guests: Giuseppe Castagna, Guillaume Duboc, and José Valim.

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    ECS / Game Development with Elixir vs. Python, JavaScript, React with Dorian Iacobescu & Daniel Luu

    ECS / Game Development with Elixir vs. Python, JavaScript, React with Dorian Iacobescu & Daniel Luu
    In Episode 4, the Elixir Wizards are joined by Dorian Iacobescu, author of the ECSpanse ECS library for Elixir, and Daniel Luu, founder and CEO of the game development studio AKREW. The guests compare notes on backend game development using ECS, the Entity Component System approach. Akrew is currently building the multiplayer game Galactic Getaway using the Photon Unity networking framework, which employs ECS. They discuss challenges like collections of component types and persistence beyond runtime, building games for various platforms like MacOS, and handling inventory storage in a backend database. Game development is complex and has many technical hurdles, but open communication across different programming communities and game development approaches can foster collaboration, innovation, and continued learning. Topics Discussed in this Episode Dorian explains the ECSpanse ECS library and component-based architecture Dorian took inspiration for ECSpanse from the Rust library Bevy ECS and its component-based API The guests discuss popular game development platforms and languages, including C#, JavaScript, and Godot Owen and Daniel translate ECS concepts to familiar database and backend terminology for devs without game-specific experience ECSpanse uses many tools from the Elixir Erlang toolbox, including GenServers, ETS tables, tasks, queries, and Phoenix LiveView ECS challenges representing inventory collections that broke typical ECS singleton patterns AKREW is developing Galactic Getaway using the Photon Unity framework Relationships between parent and child entities in ECSpanse Persistence, serialization, and replay features to save game state Optimizing assets and code for performance on various devices Links Mentioned https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entitycomponentsystem https://iacobson.medium.com/elixir-for-fun-ecspanse-2852a7993ecd https://hexdocs.pm/ecspanse/Ecspanse.html https://bevyengine.org/learn/book/getting-started/ecs/ https://www.photonengine.com/quantum Add Galactic Getaway to your Steam Wishlist: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2012390/GalacticGetaway/ https://godotengine.org/ https://unity.com/ https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/scripting/gdscript/gdscriptbasics.html https://www.tiktok.com/@galacticgetaway https://docs.rs/bevyecs/latest/bevyecs/ Special Guests: Daniel Luu and Dorian Iacobescu.