Comment by neonsunset
Comment by neonsunset 9 days ago
Unlike Python it scales with cores perfectly, which makes sense given that’s what BEAM is designed for, but the baseline cost of operations is in the same group.
https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...
It’s a bytecode-interpreted language. If it were JIT and statically typed we would have seen drastically different results. Also JIT output being slower than static compilation is a myth. When compilation happens does not dictate the kind machine code the compiler can produce (mostly, compiler throughput and JIT-time optimizations do influence this, but are not a strict limitation).
Erlang is JIT compiled since 2021.
Grandparent is also correct in that it tends to be faster than Python et al. If we have a deeper look at the benchmarks [1][2], as long as there is no significant amount of bignum arithmetic (where both call C code) or standard IO involved [3] it's consistently faster than Python, and often by a large margin.
[1]: https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...
[2]: https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...
[3]: Standard IO goes through several indirections to make it work with remote REPLs; other forms of IO do not suffer from this.