[erlang-questions] Erlang performance on Windows

[Kostis Sagonas]

Jesper,

Some comments:

> I'm mostly using Erlang to solve problems at projecteuler.net. I'm not
> sure if that qualifies as "real applications". :-) I think all of the
> problems I've solved so far have exclusively been sequential
> (calculating primes using Eratosthenes sieve, for example).

You are probably aware, I guess, that these are not the "typical" 
applications that Erlang is targeting and obviously Erlang is not the 
best language for this kind of tasks.

> I'm comparing the runtimes with what other people are getting with
> Java, Haskell, Php, Visual Basic, etc, and my Erlang code always seem
> to take 5-10 times longer time to run. Of course, it could just mean
> that I'm a lousy Erlang-programmer... ;-)

It could :-) but I somehow doubt it. If your performance difference with 
these languages (esp. PHP and Visual Basic) is more or less constant 
when the size of the benchmark increases, it probably means that your 
Erlang programming skills are not the main culprit and you need to 
investigate somewhere else.

>> In summary, HiPE (native code generation) is great, if you use it with
>> care you can get outstanding performance.
>> You don't need HiPE in order to get good or competitive performance with Erlang.
> 
> I'll run the corresponding program on my Linux-box and see what kind
> of performance difference we're really talking about.

I would be interested to see the numbers.  Especially since on that box 
you can factor out any possible "Windows surprises" and quantify the 
performance improvements that native code compilation provides for you.

Best,
Kostis