Elixir programming language evaluation for IoT

Abstract

According to industry predictions, by 2020 there will be a plethora of heterogeneous devices connected in the so-called Internet of Things (IoT). There are still many open problems in the field and this article represents the beginning of a research on the suitability of a functional language, Elixir, for building IoT software. Elixir runs on the Erlang Virtual Machine, initially built to run highly available, non-stop telecommunications applications, and lately being used by webservers with fault-tolerance and high concurrency requirements. IoT devices are essentially embedded platforms with a built-in webserver. This work evaluates the webserver response time and resource usage, while also considering factors such as number of source code lines. A Java and an Elixir implementation of a Swarm Broker prototype were compared. Although more research and experimentation on the topic is needed, preliminary results show a good prospect in favor of using Elixir in this context.