Thinking Elixir Podcast 268: Got your Popcorn here!
Sep 2, 2025
41:50
News includes a new library called Lotus and LotusWeb that provides a safe, read-only environment for running SQL analytics queries with organized storage for saved queries. After the news, we had an interview with Mateusz Front about the Popcorn project, which enables Elixir to run in WebAssembly (WASM) in the browser courtesy of AtomVM. We dig into how it works, what it's capable of doing, and where it could go in the future!
Show Notes online - http://podcast.thinkingelixir.com/268
Elixir Community News
- https://paraxial.io/ – Paraxial.io is sponsoring today's show! Sign up for a free trial of Paraxial.io today and mention Thinking Elixir when you schedule a demo for a special offer.
- https://github.com/typhoonworks/lotus – Lotus - a lightweight SQL query runner and storage library for Elixir applications with Ecto
- https://github.com/typhoonworks/lotus_web – LotusWeb - companion library for the Lotus SQL query runner
- Provides a safe, read-only environment for executing analytical queries while offering organized storage and management of saved queries
- https://www.metabase.com/ – Metabase - business intelligence tool that Lotus draws inspiration from
- https://github.com/ankane/blazer – Blazer - Ruby gem that inspired the Lotus library
Do you have some Elixir news to share? Tell us at @ThinkingElixir or email at show@thinkingelixir.com
Discussion Resources
- https://popcorn.swmansion.com/
- https://popcorn.swmansion.com/demos/eval – Interactively run an IEx shell in the browser locally with no Elixir install
- https://github.com/software-mansion/popcorn/ – Github project for Popcorn
- https://bsky.app/profile/membrane-swmansion.bsky.social/post/3luptf3p76s24 – Popcorn announcement post
- https://blog.swmansion.com/popcorn-bringing-elixir-to-the-browser-8993a58a00be – Blog post about Popcorn and how it works, limitations, etc.
- https://github.com/atomvm/AtomVM – AtomVM - Tiny Erlang VM
- https://atomvm.org/ – AtomVM is a lightweight implementation of the BEAM virtual machine
- https://podcast.thinkingelixir.com/249 – LiveDebugger - Software Mansion project we talked about previously
- https://github.com/emscripten-core/emscripten – Emscripten - An LLVM-to-WebAssembly Compiler
- https://wasi.dev/ – WebAssembly System Interface (WASI) is a group of standards-track API specifications for software compiled to the W3C WebAssembly (Wasm) standard.
- https://github.com/software-mansion/smelter – Toolkit for real-time, low latency, programmable video and audio mixing.
- https://smelter.dev/
- https://globalelixirmeetups.com/ – Website setup to coordinate the meetups (find a registered one or host)
Guest Information
- https://x.com/uusszz – on Twitter/X
- https://github.com/mat-hek/ – on Github
- https://swmansion.com/ – Software Mansion website
- https://x.com/elixirmembrane – Membrane Framework on X/Twitter
- https://bsky.app/profile/membrane-swmansion.bsky.social – Membrane Framework on Bluesky
- https://discord.com/invite/nwnfVSY – Software Mansion on Discord
Find us online
- Message the show - Bluesky
- Message the show - X
- Message the show on Fediverse - @ThinkingElixir@genserver.social
- Email the show - show@thinkingelixir.com
- Mark Ericksen on X - @brainlid
- Mark Ericksen on Bluesky - @brainlid.bsky.social
- Mark Ericksen on Fediverse - @brainlid@genserver.social
- David Bernheisel on Bluesky - @david.bernheisel.com
- David Bernheisel on Fediverse - @dbern@genserver.social
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