When talking about Elixir (or Erlang) you are actually talking about two things that give you the value:
- A language (Elixir/Erlang) and runtime (BEAM)
- The concurrency standard library (OTP)
The language and runtime give you the low level concurrency primitives - spawn a process, send a message etc. But to build actual applications, you rarely use those primitives directly - instead you use GenServers and supervisors. That gives yo a way to manage state, turns message passing into function calls, restarts things when they crash etc.
Gleam compiles to the same runtime, but doesn't provide OTP in the same way - static types aren't easy to make work with the freely message passing world of OTP. They are implementing a lot of the same concepts, but that's work that Gleam has to do.
(Elixir provides some thin API wrappers over the Erlang OTP APIs, and then also provides some additional capabilities like Tasks).
- A language (Elixir/Erlang) and runtime (BEAM) - The concurrency standard library (OTP)
The language and runtime give you the low level concurrency primitives - spawn a process, send a message etc. But to build actual applications, you rarely use those primitives directly - instead you use GenServers and supervisors. That gives yo a way to manage state, turns message passing into function calls, restarts things when they crash etc.
Gleam compiles to the same runtime, but doesn't provide OTP in the same way - static types aren't easy to make work with the freely message passing world of OTP. They are implementing a lot of the same concepts, but that's work that Gleam has to do.
(Elixir provides some thin API wrappers over the Erlang OTP APIs, and then also provides some additional capabilities like Tasks).