[strmpnk]

I think this is a valid observation but the reason isn't necessarily that the Ruby language can't be used in a similar way, it's more so a death by 1000 cuts where Ruby encourages very small costs to be paid everywhere in return for a nicer programming experience.

The issue becomes hard to fix because all of these small costs add up but none will show as up a single bottleneck in practice, making profiling a blunt tool for this kind of performance problem. Elixir isn't immune to this either but the functional aspects of design do help keep some of these choices local to the code that chooses to trade some time or memory away for other conveniences.

An example I saw recently of this sort of adoption is map access, which is entirely okay if the trade-off is understood. I put in some time to show that much of the understanding of performance profile of the Access behavior gets colored by these expectations that the small things don't matter: https://lobste.rs/s/bctcke/performance_elixir_s_access_behav...