Elixir - Overview

Elixir is a dynamic, functional language designed for building scalable and maintainable applications. Elixir leverages the Erlang VM, known for running low-latency, distributed and fault-tolerant systems, while also being successfully used in web development and the embedded software domain.

Elixir is a functional, dynamic language built on top of Erlang and the Erlang VM. Erlang is a language that was originally written in 1986 by Ericsson to help solve telephony problems like distribution, fault-tolerance, and concurrency. Elixir, written by José Valim, extends Erlang and provides a friendlier syntax into the Erlang VM. It does this while keeping the performance of the same level as Erlang.
Some features of Elixir:

1. Scalability All Elixir code runs inside lightweight processes that are isolated and exchange information via messages.
   
2. Fault Tolerance Elixir provides supervisors which describe how to restart parts of your system when things go wrong, going back to a known initial state that is guaranteed to work. This ensures your application/platform is never down.
   
3. Functional Programming Functional programming promotes a coding style that helps developers write code that is short, fast, and maintainable.
   
4. Build tools Elixir ships with a set of development tools. Mix is one such tools that makes it easy to create projects, manage tasks, run tests, etc. It also has its own package manager - Hex.
   
5. Erlang Compatibility Elixir runs on the Erlang VM giving developers complete access to Erlang’s ecosystem.