Web Dev is something of a broad category these days, in that a whole lot of things happen to have a web interface.

So for example, we use Elixir to manage the upgrade and configuration of industrial sensors. We’ve got a raspberry pi with an Elixir service on it that watches for sensors to connect, handles queueing up data files on them for upload, and then manages state machines for each sensor as they’re upgraded or conditioned.

It also has a web UI powered by phoenix channels so that it can show the status of each sensor live. So it’s sort of web dev, but it may help answer your question.

Telephony of course

I’m using it to send messages to mod_kazoo on FreeSWITCH (but of course this is so that we can interact with it from a web front-end)

I have written a number of non-web projects including:

• Log file parser
• protocol parser
• lots of competitive programming exercises
• a couple simple language intrepeters
• a complex telephony application
• a reliable udp stack
• Asterisk PBX AMI and AGI implementations
• and Emergency call out system (web front end was a small component of the application)
• general purpose scripts

Elixir is a programming language for working in the Erlang ecosystem. The Erlang system is applied to any number of things where reliability (fault tolerance), concurrency and distribution are key features. Erlang was originally created for telecom systems, like phone switches, but has been applied to creating databases (e.g. Riak, CouchDB, Cloudant), online games, sports entertainment systems, systems for placing wagers, online communication systems like WhatsApp, media distribution applications… lots of things.

Now in some of those cases folks are using the Erlang language (rather than Elixir) but Elixir would be just as applicable in those cases as well.

Phoenix is the archetypal framework, written in Elixir, for creating an application with a web server. I’ve used Phoenix with Absinthe to create a web application that presents an GraphQL interface… but I’ve also used Elixir for “middle tier” systems (systems that handle the flow of information between a front-end application and a back-end system). I’ve also created utility applications that do things like scrape GitHub Repos and generate reports (scraping the repos in parallel).

Even more through the “Nerves” project you can create embedded systems that use Elixir. I have a Raspberry Pi based system I’ve been working on which interfaces with thermocouples and a fan to provide a barbecue controller (yes… you could go buy one of those, but where is the fun in that?).

So there are lots of uses outside of web development. The hallmarks of the platform are concurrency, resilience, and distribution - Elixir is a great fit for any system that needs those things.

I have IRC and Discord bots, some servers that manage game servers, a static site generator, and a few more things actively running in either Elixir or Erlang right now that are not web servers.