[rkangel]

For "straight line" single thread number-crunching, other languages will often be faster. With the new JIT, I doubt they are 10 times faster, but you're right there is a difference.

That's often not the limiting factor though. Elixir makes it very easy to have excellent parallelism on your work so you actually take full advantage of processor. The design of the BEAM means that things are naturally quite low latency, and often you lose performance due to just waiting for things (this characteristic is why webservers on the BEAM are pretty fast).

The other key aspect is NX - like ML libraries in Python, Elixir is just orchestrating and the number crunching is done in C libraries or on GPU etc.