Elixir Nx. What Do We Know About This Mysterious Project?
If you are working with Elixir or paying close attention to the community, there is hardly any way you could have missed José Valim's tweets about a mysterious new project called Nx:
Also: "We have also been really hard at work over the last 2 months on a project called Nx [...] that has the potential to bring Elixir to areas that were not explored in depth before! [...] I will be officially presenting these projects this February on @LambdaDays!" 2/2 :D
— José Valim (@josevalim) January 11, 2021
José has been teasing for months, occasionally posting screenshots with exciting benchmarks:
Here are some benchmarks on this new thing for Elixir we are working on... and it can actually go faster than that! pic.twitter.com/eWRpfldU6J
— José Valim (@josevalim) November 24, 2020
About a week ago, he also introduced a logo and a cute little mascot for the project:
Last week I shared the concept art for Nx but we ended-up going on a different route. None of the projects I had worked on had a mascot... so I wanted to give it a try for Nx. Here is Nx official logo! :D pic.twitter.com/qXeG1TPR6k
— José Valim (@josevalim) January 29, 2021
For those thinking whether this is a squirrel, skunk, or perhaps a fox - it's neither. It is a Numbat, a marsupial native to southern Australia. Having been a long-time fan of Go's gopher, I like the idea of introducing a mascot. It helps make programming and science communities look more friendly and welcoming, especially to new joiners.
That's all cool, but what is Nx about?
Honestly, no one but José, the folks at Dashbit, and the hosts of the Thinking Elixir podcast (to whom he spoke about the project - the episode has not been released yet) seems to know. There are quite a few clues, though. Like this one:
I was just tidying up Nx' docs as preparation for this week and it is amazing how much was done in 2.5 months! And none of this would be possible without @sean_moriarity!
— José Valim (@josevalim) January 25, 2021
For those that don't know, Sean Moriarity is the author of a library and a recently released book on genetic algorithms in Elixir. So, something about machine learning, then? Or perhaps, fast numeric computations. It makes a lot of sense, especially when looking at the project's visual identity - the "N" in Nx probably stands for Numeric. This is further supported by the name of the mascot - Numbat. Numbat, got it? Others speculated that the N stands for Native (as in NIF - a way to mix Elixir/Erlang with fast C code), again supported by the numbat being native to Australia. Anyway, I hope you're starting to get the idea.
If this turns out to be accurate, Nx will help introduce a whole new class of potential use cases for Elixir in areas where the BEAM VM has traditionally not been the first choice.
When will Nx be officially released?
According to José on Twitter, he will officially show Nx to the general public during Lambda Days 2021 (Feb 16-19). Let's have a little more patience, and we will finally get to know everything about this new exciting addition to the Elixir family.