Nerves and hot code reloading got me into erlang after I watched a demo of patching code on a flying drone ~8 years ago.

While I can't imagine hot reloading is super practicle in production, it does highlight that erlang/beam/otp has great primitives for building reliable production systems.

Code reloading on embedded Nerves devices is fantastic. If you have non-trivial hardware or state you can just hot load new code to test a fix live. Great for integration testing.

I literally used hot code reloading a few weeks back to fix a 4-20 mA circuit on a new beta firmware while a client was watching in remote Colorado. Told them I was “fixing a config”. Tested it on our device and then they checked it out over a satellite PLC system. Then I made an update Nerves FW, uploaded it. Made the client happy!

Note that I’ve found that using scp to copy the files to /tmp and then use Code.compile to work better than copy and paste in IEx. The error messages get proper line numbers.

It’s also very simple to write a helper function to compile all the code in /tmp and then delete it. I’ve got a similar one in my project that scp’s any changed elixir files in my project over. It’s pretty nice.

I used to work on a pretty big elixir project that had many clients with long lived connections that ran jobs that weren't easily resumable. Our company had a language agnostic deployment strategy based on docker, etc which meant we couldn't do hot code updates even though they would have saved our customers some headache.

Honestly I wish we had had the ability to do both. Sometimes a change is so tricky that the argument that "hot code updates are complicated and it'll cause more issues than it will solve" is very true, and maybe a deploy that forces everyone to reconnect is best for that sort of change. But often times we'd deploy some mundane thing where you don't have to worry about upgrading state in a running gen server or whatever, and it'd be nice to have minimal impact.

Obviously that's even more complexity piled onto the system, but every time I pushed some minor change and caused a retry that (in a perfect world at least...) didn't need to retry, I winced a bit.

We use hot code upgrades on kosmi.io with great success.

It's absolute magic and allows for very rapid development and ease of deploying fixes and updates.

We do use have to use distillery though and have had to resort to a bunch of custom glue bash scripts which I wish was more standardized because it's such a killer feature.

Due to Elixirs efficiency, everything is running on a single node despite thousands of concurrents so haven't really experienced how it handles multiple nodes.

When I worked at Discord, we used BEAM hot code loading pretty extensively, built a bunch of tooling around it to apply and track hot-patches to nodes (which in turn could update the code on >100M processes in the system.) It allowed us to deploy hot-fixes in minutes (full tilt deploy could complete in a matter of seconds) to our stateful real-time system, rather than the usual ~hour long deploy cycle. We generally only used it for "emergency" updates though.

The tooling would let us patch multiple modules at a time, which basically wrapped `:rpc.call/4` and `Code.eval_string/1` to propagate the update across the cluster, which is to say, the hot-patch was entirely deployed over erlang's built-in distribution.