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Comment by izelnakri | Hacker News Reader

4th one depends on the implementation, and it isn't a disadvantage since most scripting languages have the same characteristic.

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Speaking as someone who came to Elixir from Scala/Akka on the JVM, yes it is absolutely a disadvantage, and no there is no implementation of the Erlang VM which rivals the JVM for speed. In Erlang/Elixir you get speed through horizontal scalability (which is easy) and/or writing parts of your code in another, faster language (which is harder).

Why did you leave Akka for elixir?

There were a few reasons. I never loved Scala, and I especially didn't like the let's-write-Haskell-in-Scala obsession with static typing that affects half the community. The JVM and Akka both have a lot of knobs to tweak, whereas the BEAM seems to have saner defaults.

I didn't need rocket fast performance and I didn't need any JVM libraries, but I did like the actor model of concurrency and process supervision, so when it came time to look for greener pastures, Elixir was a solid choice. I've been using it in production just over a year, and it's been excellent.

Fair enough. I've dug into the haskell-as-scala stuff and found it academically interesting but somewhat divorced from reality with respect to how immediately useful it would be to most projects.

How many implementations are there?

I can give you 3 already: 1- doing it with SQL, 2- Distributed way with processes, 3- Doing it with custom NIFs etc.

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