Bootstrapping a multiplayer server with Elixir

Building a gameserver in Elixir is not great imo, performance is subpar. I work in online games and no one would want to use that language.

I guess they have low constrains since they only need to support 10000 players at a time and they want a single instance for that.

- Erlang runtime is slow

- Memory consumption is high

- GC is not very good ( vs Java / C# / Go )

- high cost in term of performance because of immutability

It's not the kind of things you want for a game.

To give you some perspective on popular FPS games, they run between 30hz and 120hz with up to 64 players and usually only use a single CPU core. And they're doing gameplay simulation / state replication / physics sometimes AI etc ...

Also it must be pretty painful to not re-use their C++ client code on the server side, they have to re-implement twice? ( this concern is actually higher than the performance one )

Overall I think it's an impressive achievement to be able to do that for a single person in 6 month!

This is the kind of thing that I love about Elixir. As great as Phoenix is, realistically you are going to be equally productive in any web framework. Elixir is my favorite language because it gives you primitives that perfectly suit your needs for just about anything running on a socket, especially once you add in Plug.

Throwing together a prototype is instant, but the awesome part is how quickly you can turn that prototype into something useful. More concurrency? Done. Need to sock away some state somewhere you can easily find and deal with it? Easy. It's easy to write, easy to reason about, and gives you fantastic composable tools to put something great together. It doesn't feel like a codebase so much as an incredibly well managed and cohesive OS.