I'm currently in a journey to learn and improve my Elixir and Go skills (my daily job uses C++) and looking through my backlog for projects to take on I decided Elixir is the perfect language to write a highly-parallel BitTorrent tracker. So I have spent my free time these last 3 months writing one! Now I think it has enough features to present it to the world (and a docker image to give it a quick try).
I know some people see trackers as relics of the past now that DHT and PEX are common but I think they still serve a purpose in today's Internet (purely talking about public trackers). That said there is not a lot going on in terms of new developments since everyone just throws opentracker in a vps a calls it a day (honorable exceptions: aquatic and torrust).
I plan to continue development for the foreseeable future and add some (optional) esoteric features along the way so if anyone currently operates a tracker please give a try and enjoy the lack of crashes.
note: only swarm_printout.ex has been vibe coded, the rest has all been written by hand.
The let it crash philosophy allows you to ignore most corner cases with the knowledge that, if they are encountered or a cosmic ray flips a bit, the crash is localised to a single client. I have worked with Elixir almost a decade at this point, and I have never seen an unexpected downtime of the apps I deployed. Aside of maintenance and updates, they all have 100% uptime. How cool is that?
This is how I sell it to clients. “Will you be using Python, Go?” Me: “What about Elixir and the promise that your service won’t ever crash? And you get cool dashboards with it.” Them: “Sold.”
I wish there was a systems language that allows you to pattern match on structs and enums, and in function signatures like Elixir
[1] https://docs.inko-lang.org/manual/latest/getting-started/pat...