[erlang-questions] About Erlang system performance

[Jesper Louis Andersen]

On Nov 9, 2012, at 9:42 AM, hume npx <humeafo@REDACTED> 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.

In addition to other excellent responses, I would like to add the concept of latency on top. Most of the languages you compare to are focused more on throughput than on latency in the sense of concurrency and handling of concurrency. For certain problems, like heavy number crunching, this is *exactly* what you want.

On the other hand, if you are worried how quickly you respond back, then you are probably more served by picking Erlang as a tool.

One could say that Erlang is not really optimized for the Shootout benchmarks as much as for other kinds of problems.

Jesper Louis Andersen
  Erlang Solutions Ltd., Copenhagen