Pyrlang is very much alive and being worked on and improved https://github.com/Pyrlang/Pyrlang .

The main differences between erlport and Pyrlang are (as far as I can tell):

• Pyrlang is being actively developed while erlport is on “life-support”, the original developer hasn’t interacted with the project in more than 2 years
• erlport (as the name says) implements the port interface, so you launch a Python process from Erlang and interact with it roughly like you would with an Erlang process, internally by talking with it over stdin/out
• Pyrlang implements a full node in Python (you have to start the Python process separately and interact with it using Erlang’s distribution mechanism
• erlport uses a pure-python ETF serialisation while Pyrlang uses a Rust implementation that is very likely to be a lot faster
• erlport is not async, to interact with Python you will always call a function

We have been using erlport for quite a while now in production. It works in general but the installation is a bit more hassle than it should be as it requires the (manual) installation of the erlport Python part.

I like the fact that you can start up erlport as a simple sub-process, though it shouldn’t be too hard to either add this functionality to Pyrlang (the port protocol is really simple and very close to how nodes talk to each other) or to start a Pyrlang node on demand from Erlang and just supervise the process as such.

Calling python/other_language code from Elixir could be more hassle than its worth, as it could complicate development and deployment (environment setup, packaging etc.)

So if you’re already using a service oriented architecture, I’d think about simply exposing functionality of your python services through eg HTTP or RabbitMq and consuming that from all-Elixir apps.

That could give you a nice separation and the confidence to introduce an unfamiliar language to your workplace (in an non threatening way to other devs too) and get a feel for it on something small/contained before deciding about full-on investment.

FYI: Pyrlang

• I haven’t used it
• I don’t know what state the project is in.

Using a BEAM/Erlang/Elixir Port is how you’d communicate, and you can use whatever API style you want, but if you want it as ‘native’ as possible then something like the erlport library for python makes it as ‘native’ as possible to the BEAM (it treats a python system like just another module). In some cases other format can be faster though, it all depends on the data you are transferring.