[erlang-questions] Elixir from Erlang

[Igor Clark]

Hi folks,

Seeing a lot of interesting stuff coming out of CodeBeam SF talking about Elixir and how it can leverage the Erlang platform and libraries. There are some really interesting Elixir projects there, and loads elsewhere.

I haven’t looked into it much but from what I can tell Elixir takes full advantage of BEAM - there’s no special runtime or VM stuff happening, and the compiler just creates standard beam files, right? - and Elixir can use Erlang deps without any particular effort, just pull in via “mix” - but there’s been no obvious mechanism created to expose Elixir back to Erlang, so there's no *obvious* way to pull in Elixir deps in an Erlang project. Meaning any new Erlang code can immediately be used in Elixir projects, but the reverse isn’t true; Erlang projects can’t easily get access to any of the heaps of new Elixir libraries being written.

Is that right, or am I missing something? Is there a way to do this? Are there language-level reasons or extensions which mean this isn’t possible anyway? If not, what would be involved? Would it be possible for rebar3 to support this, so that erlang projects could just include elixir libraries as deps? Perhaps via a plugin that (for example) calls out to the Elixir compiler in the way the port compiler does for C code? How complex would that be?

Thanks!
Igor