It's been a big few weeks for the BEAM. Both Erlang/OTP 29 and Elixir 1.20 have shipped.
Elixir 1.20
Released on 3 June 2026, Elixir 1.20 is a landmark for the type system. The compiler now performs type inference and gradual type checking of every Elixir program, with no type annotations required. In practice that means Elixir increasingly flags dead code and guaranteed-to-fail typing violations, with a very low false-positive rate.
Highlights:
- Type narrowing across guards,
case/cond/withclauses, and conditionals (occurrence typing), so types are more precise inside each branch. - Much of the standard library is now typed, including most of the
Mapmodule and tuples. - Faster compilation, especially on many-core machines, the benchmarks now put Mix among the fastest build tools on the BEAM.
Erlang/OTP 29
OTP 29 (13 May 2026) leans hard into security and developer ergonomics:
- Secure-by-default SSH (shell/exec disabled unless you opt in) and a
post-quantum
x25519mlkem768default key exchange for TLS. - New warnings for unsafe and potentially-unsafe functions, plus secure coding guidelines.
- Experimental native records (EEP-79), multi-valued comprehensions, an
is_integer/3guard, and JIT improvements for binary matching.
If you want to play with both, point your version manager at Elixir 1.20.1 on OTP 29.0.2, that's what runs this very site's build pipeline.
We'll cover the ecosystem updates at the next meetup, RSVP on Luma.