[erlang-questions] About Erlang system performance

[Richard Carlsson]

On 2012-11-09 09:42, hume npx wrote:
> Hi, all:
>    I'am new to erlang, after investigate some benchmark such as at
> http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/which-programs-are-fastest.php, I
> found that erlang compiler is not so good at speed? the benchmark shows
> that erlang Hipe is 13x slowdown compared to C++, as compared to Haskell
> GHC (3.3x slowdown), go 2.98x slowdown or even javascript v8 is about 1x
> faster than erlang, I investigated the erLLVM project which reported
> similar results to Hipe, you know performance is so important nowadays,
> what caused the hard to improve performace of erlang or just there are
> not people working on it? Erlang is attractive to me after several days
> studying, but with great performance will be more attractive and
> competitive to some languages such as go etc.

For the sort of computationally heavy code that you'll find in the 
shootout benchmarks, you should be comparing Erlang to other dynamically 
typed languages like Python and Ruby. One of the main reasons that 
Haskell, C++, and the other statically typed languages in the list are 
so much faster at this kind of code is that they don't have any (or at 
least very little) run-time overhead for checking what type of value is 
stored in a variable. Erlang is not aimed at crunching numbers, but it 
does a pretty good job of it compared to other dynamically typed 
languages - even without HiPE.

     /Richard