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OTP and BEAM are maintained by a very small team compared to other language projects. Working on math performance could likely reduce the amount of time to be spent on other things.

Perhaps there are some easy wins, but JIT is not an easy thing. Depending on your needs, pushing math onto a port, or a nif is probably a quicker win than trying to make it fast in Erlang. However, I wonder if the single static assignment optimizer would offer a path towards recognizing 'straight line math code' and potentially running things much faster. But there's still an issue of potential mismatch between the very general number format with automatic bignum promotion and whatever the underlying machine provides.