>>Elixir depends on the decades of development behind the Erlang VM and in many ways is just syntactic sugar on top of Erlang/OTP

I think calling Elixir "just syntactic sugar" is a gross and unfair oversimplification. While friendly syntax is one of its welcoming qualities, Elixir is its own language. It doesn't "transpile" into Erlang. It compiles down to bytecode.

https://medium.com/@fxn/how-does-elixir-compile-execute-code...

Elixir creates an AST which is transformed into Erlang Abstract Format (http://erlang.org/doc/apps/erts/absform.html) which is then compiled into Erlang bytecode by Erlang compiler.

Erlang VM's bytecode is largely undocumented (except for third-party attempts like http://erlangonxen.org/more/beam and http://beam-wisdoms.clau.se/en/latest/). So all languages on the Erlang VM either create and compile Erlang Abstract Format or transpile to Core Erlang (https://8thlight.com/blog/kofi-gumbs/2017/05/02/core-erlang....)