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Comment by mercurial | Hacker News Reader

The performance question is a good one. Erlang has never been a performance wonder, so I'd be surprised to hear that Elixir is noticeably faster than Ruby.

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What are you talking about, its like an order of magnitude faster than ruby? It might not be as fast as Go or Java or whatever, but its not even a comparison to ruby, and particularly rails.

Is it really that much faster? I mean, Rails is a separate problem, but I would have put Erlang in the same perf bracket as Ruby/Perl/Python.

Perhaps in raw computation its more similar, but based on the context of your comment (and its parent), it seems more like you're comparing it to ruby+rails in a real-life scenario (say, a web app). (The original comment was about "what did he gain"?)

In that case, the multithreaded nature of Elixir and the VM there's no comparison.

I tried searching for raw ruby+erlang benchmarks but couldnt find much in the short time I looked.

Can confirm, elixir+phoenix outperforms ruby+rails by ~10x.

If we're talking about pure ruby and elixir, things become complicated, you can do some stuff a bit faster in ruby sometimes (where ruby is using native optimized C code)

Remember that the starting point for your comparison is Ruby. It's a great language, but not one you reach for if performance is a primary consideration.

DHH even acknowledges this: "But sure, I'd like free CPU cycles too. I just happen to care much more about free developer cycles and am willing to trade the former for the latter."

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