The only sane choice here is for Elixir atoms to be Erlang atoms, in the fullest sense of "to be", so that restriction is coming from Erlang, not Elixir. Erlang does exactly what you say; the memory leak in question is when you blow out that table. The Erlang language and runtime permit dynamic atom construction, which is useful because atoms are also the way functions and modules are referenced and it's nice to be able to dynamically compute such things, but if you continuously generate new atoms, you'll run out of memory.
The only sane choice here is for Elixir atoms to be Erlang atoms, in the fullest sense of "to be", so that restriction is coming from Erlang, not Elixir. Erlang does exactly what you say; the memory leak in question is when you blow out that table. The Erlang language and runtime permit dynamic atom construction, which is useful because atoms are also the way functions and modules are referenced and it's nice to be able to dynamically compute such things, but if you continuously generate new atoms, you'll run out of memory.