[erlang-questions] Erlang is the best choice for building commercial application servers

[Richard O'Keefe]

Jan Burse's naive reverse for Erlang is not quite what we usually mean
by nrev; he measures the time to create the initial data list as well,
which the Java version doesn't.

Revising the Erlang code slightly, I got 2.8 usec per call.
I also revised the Java code slightly, for example, NOT to
use accessor methods, and NOT to require any casting during
the benchmark.  Also, both benchmarks were revised by
doing

	t0 = now
	run a dummy benchmark calling an identity function
	t1 = now
	run the real benchmark
	t2 = now
	report ((t2 - t1) - (t1 - t0))/(double)number-of-iterations

as is traditional in the naive reverse benchmark.

The final score:

Erlang:  2.8 usec per call
Java  :  3.2 usec per call (reported as 3226.977 nsec)

Machine: a MacBook pro with a 2GHz Intel core 2 Duo cpu running
Mac OS X 10.6.8.

Multiplying these numbers by 6000 to match Jan Burse's:
	Me	    Him	     Him, scaled
Erlang  16.8 m      ~60 ms   ~ 72.9 ms
Java    19.2 ms     ~30 ms   ~ 36.5 ms
(The scaled column assumes that the 2430 number is CPU
speed; if that's not what it is, ignore that column.)

There's one tiny change that accounts for this.

And it's the reason this benchmark really tells us nothing worth knowing.