We use Elixir at TV Labs to build our web services, a realtime matching engine, execute sandboxed Lua code, talk to microcontrollers over binary protocols, machine learning, and much more.

It is an excellent general purpose language that succeeds in a lot of domains.

Check out my conversation from Developer Voices for more info

https://youtu.be/_MwXbHADT-A?si=2lRqjwAY9dsODyhW

Elixir is not a sandboxed language, so you can't just accept arbitrary Elixir programs from users and execute them inside of your application without security concerns. Lua, on the other hand, can be executed in a sandboxed fashion, limiting and constraining the reach of user programs.

Check out Anthony Accomazzo's post about Mini-Elixir, which does a great job breaking this down much further https://blog.sequinstream.com/why-we-built-mini-elixir/

There is a fennel channel in the discord/slack if you're interested. I'm not sure how successful it has been

Fennel compiles to Lua, so theoretically it should work.

You should be able to do anything Lua does, run on any Lua interpreter, and use any Lua library.

Both the Lua library and Luerl predate Pythonx. I started this library nearly 2 years ago, its only now that I'm releasing a stable version.

However, Pythonx was originally created by a member of our team, Cocoa, who built it in her own free time. The Livebook team forked her project, conceptually, and released it.

https://github.com/cocoa-xu/pythonx

Very cool, thank you both for your contributions!

Thanks, I really appreciate that. While its not my main focus by any means, its been a really fun project to chip away at (both the higher level library and Luerl itself).

I do think that it has the potential to be really great with continued investment

Let me know if you have any questions, I'd be happy to assist

If you're looking for a cool example of Lua running on the BEAM, check out the creator of Luerl (Robert Virding) space ship demo

https://github.com/rvirding/ship-demo

Here is a video demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NC8Xl6tvjfk

Some instructions to install it on macOS: https://erlangforums.com/t/lt-using-luerl-to-run-spaceships-...

Thanks Josh, hope to see you soon, its been a while

Likewise! ElixirConfUS?

Probably not, you should come to Code BEAM NYC, although a bit of a trek for you.

I will be trying to travel more in 2026

Author here!

Luerl++ is not a valid module name :)

More seriously, I considered alternate names, but settled on this because it was short, literal, and given that its in the context of Elixir, makes sense when using it.

As you stated, the hope is to consolidate it into Luerl at some point

Have you considered "Luex", a nod to Luerl but with the typical Elixir suffix?

Humble appeal, because they'd win instantly: Please don't steal my useless project's name [0].

[0] https://luarocks.org/modules/shakna-israel/luaex

I have a personal mission to never name any libraries with the -ex prefix

Curious, why?

Early in the Elixir days, every library was named Thing-ex of ex-Thing.

IMO this is really lazy in terms of naming and from a usage perspective, you get really tired of typing that out in code.

I think we can do better

Suffixing a name with -ex often results in unique names, which helps filtering search results. I see a slight problem with name ending on an s though.

Also, aren't you the author of jqex? ;)

Touche, although that is a 5 line utility.

Filtering which search results? On hex.pm that’s irrelevant. On good “library name + elixir”

For most of the workloads you’re putting on the BEAM, they are IO bound and this is not of any consequence