September 02, 2025

268: Got your Popcorn here!

41 minutes

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 [email protected]

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 - @[email protected]

Email the show - [email protected]

Mark Ericksen on X - @brainlid

Mark Ericksen on Bluesky - @brainlid.bsky.social

Mark Ericksen on Fediverse - @[email protected]

David Bernheisel on Bluesky - @david.bernheisel.com

David Bernheisel on Fediverse - @[email protected]