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by lenkite 218 days ago
The BEAM VM executing bytecode is slower than a compiled binary. Sure, it is great when compared to Python and other interpreted languages. Not so much when you need fast processing and raw CPU performance. It also loses out to the JVM in performance, but wins in memory consumption.
2 comments
dmpk2k 218 days ago
It is slower, but a big cause of the slowness is a lot of copying (immutable data structures and separate heaps for every process). Nowadays the BEAM has a JIT.

If you use type guards correctly the performance can be surprisingly good. Not C/C++/Rust/Go/Java good, but not too far off either. This is definitely a corner-case though.

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DrewADesign 218 days ago
But how many things involve fulfilling basic requests over a network pulling information from a database? Most things just don’t need that kind of performance.
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lenkite 218 days ago
Sure for basic, dead CRUD, the choice of middleware language rarely makes any difference.

But even bog-standard business processes eventually find the need for data-processing, crypto and parsing - the use-cases where people code Elixir NIF's. That is why for example you have projects like html5ever_elixir for parsing HTML/XML. Another use case is crypto - you have NIF's for several crypto libraries. Data processing - there are NIF's for Rust polars.

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DrewADesign 218 days ago
> Sure for basic, dead CRUD

From a technical perspective, this is the overwhelming majority of what makes the Net happen. BEAM is great for that and many other things, like extremely reliable communication streams.

Use the right tool for the job. Rust sucks for high-level systems automation but that doesn’t make it any less useful than bash. It’s all about about use cases and Elixir fits many common use cases nicely, while providing some nice-to-haves that people often ask for in other common web dev environments.

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